A key issue for all the students of women’s and gender histories lies in the deeply held assumption that these are in the end special interest subjects, important for those who study them, but not central for “mainstream” scholars. Tanika Sarkar’s important new book Religion And Women in India: Gender, Faith, and Politics 1780s–1980s follows many other scholars in exposing the intellectual flaws in this continuing “ghettoisation”.
Unlike many others, however, she ranges over the whole history of the subcontinent from the late eighteenth century to independent India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the 1980s. She shows how, at every stage, gender was not simply one of many social themes, but was in practice constitutive of key relationships right across the subcontinent’s politics, economies, societies and cultural orders.
Religion And Women in India: Gender, Faith, and Politics 1780s–1980s, Tanika Sarkar, Permanent Black, 2024
Her book also offers an exceptionally comprehensive introduction to scholars new to the subject, students and general readers looking to develop their understanding. The reader is spared dense footnotes, and offered a carefully focussed reading list at the end of each chapter. Yet the book is also much more than an overview or synthesis.
First, at every turn, Sarkar illustrates her arguments in practical and vivid terms, with fascinating and often little-known local details of the women and the men who worked to challenge the gender hierarchies of their times, to create new spaces for action or imagination, or, alternatively, who strove to defend the existing order. Second, she lays great emphasis on the particularities of local circumstance, the complexities and contradictions which often derailed the best-laid plans of governors, political leaders and social reformers alike. Third, the book makes a powerful argument for the centrality of religion, of “faith”, in any understanding of how gender has worked as such a powerful force across the turbulent centuries of colonialism and the coming of modernity.
The remaking of colonial India’s gender order forms the major focus of the book. With a superb combination of nuance and narrative clarity, Sarkar ranges over the interplay between gender and the shaping of India’s legal systems in the construction of “personal laws”. She explores the gendering of labour with the move into factories and mines, the striving of elite women reformers to limit the labour of women workers, and the emergence of new professions for middle class women. A substantial chapter explores the gendering of colonial politics and the huge range of new political associations which drew in men and women, the young and the old in different ways. The ambiguities and paradoxes are striking here.
Even as nationalist politics and organisations both of the left and the right opened up some powerful leadership roles for women, these were cast in the language of maternal guidance, or the powers of the divine feminine. Even amongst the most progressive, separate spheres and complementary roles remained the ideal. Further chapters explore colonial gender in relation to sexuality, and the new worlds of print culture and popular performance.
Where, in these explorations, does Sarkar locate the key significance of religion and “faith”, identified as critical in the title of the book? The theme is woven throughout. Sometimes it appears in the interplay of many forces: as she emphasises, in India as elsewhere, religion and gender are caught up in many histories. In other settings, such as the making of colonial laws, their interplay emerges as a key shaping influence.
More than any other topic, the making of colonial law also exemplifies Sarkar’s contention that gender is not simply one of the many themes for the historian, but was itself in colonial India constitutive of a whole range of other political and institutional relationships. It was through the law that the colonial state early sought to construct a basis of legitimacy for its rule, and rendered the subcontinent’s diverse communities legible – as essentially religious constructs – to British policy-makers.
Colonial governments and Indian leaders alike turned to the law either to alleviate the social constraints under which Indian women lived, or to defend them as the very cornerstones of family and religion. From the mid-nineteenth century, the emerging construct of “personal laws” affirmed what the colonial state saw as the essentially religious basis of Indian community identity, and indicated the limits of its willingness to intervene directly in matters of religion, family and custom. Through personal laws, with their constitution of men and women as different kinds of subject in relation to the state, colonial governments also sought to reassure family and community heads that their patriarchal authority was insulated from the powerful new forces associated with coming of colonialism.
Sarkar traces out how this proliferation of personal laws around different “religious” communities not only shaped gender roles and individual life chances, but radiated out right across the wider field of politics. The gender wars of the nineteenth century – around the institution of Sati, the remarriage of Hindu widows and the legal age of consent – were critical in shaping Hindu revivalism right through into the 1920s, when a new generation of reforming nationalists and women’s organisations entered the fray.
India’s interwar Muslim leadership also looked to personal laws – in the Shariat Act of 1937 – to build the notion of a single all-India Muslim identity. What was less well foreseen was that in the longer term, this unitary model of “Hindu” personal laws did much to erode the latitude customarily allowed to lower caste, tribal and Dalit women, and gradually to disseminate Brahmanic social norms amongst them.
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Interestingly, though, it is in her discussion of sexualities – “Holy and unholy gender” that Sarkar makes her most explicit argument for the absolute centrality of religion in shaping the subcontinent’s cultures of gender. Rather than following the path of secularisation and “disenchantment” of the world that conventional theories of modernisation might have suggested, colonial India saw rather a huge proliferation of new forms of faith and worship, greatly amplified in the world of cheap vernacular print and new performance media. This proliferation was evident across all communities and at all social levels.
It extended from the charismatic saints, minor god-men, pirs and shrines often serving popular classes, to the reformist religious associations emphasising “modern” models of piety to the Anglophone educated, to the professional mystics and intellectuals who catered to middle-class piety, both reformist and conservative.
Not all of these colonial religious cultures were conservative. Some opened up new roles to women as spiritual leaders, affirmed the importance of women’s work as “modern” wives and mothers, or advocated some forms of female education. However, most endorsed what were in the end conventional norms for women, which measured their value primarily as capable housewives and devoted mothers. Why was this so? Why was it the case that in the field of religious belief and practice, as in politics, such conventions proved in the end so entrenched, and the needs of women seen as necessarily subordinate to those of the family?
What is needed, Sarkar suggests, is a new history of Indian conservatism, which would take seriously the huge weight of social opposition that the most cautious of social reformers encountered when they pressed for change. Such a history would not attribute this conservatism quite so overwhelmingly to the bourgeois patriarchal values of the colonial state. Rather, it would look to Indian agencies of many different kinds – religious conservatives, community heads, men qualified in the new professions, liberal nationalists, middle class women – as they took in the lead in reshaping family and community identities amid the social transformations of colonialism.
Although Sarkar takes the reader through these larger arguments, the book is also rich in local detail. Some of this emerges in her accounts of Hindu widowhood, the subject of such conflict and personal pain. She reminds us that the entrenched hostility to widow remarriage arose from the Hindu belief that a woman’s body was ardhangini, the half body of her husband, believed to live on in her until the end of her own days.
She looks at some well-known supporters for the remarriage of widows, such as Ramabai Ranade and the Maharashtrian men and women who worked with her. Sarkar’s narrative also offers a wealth of less familiar examples: the Shudra weavers of Bengal reputed to have embroidered verses praising the great reformer Vidyasagar into their saris, or the traditions of South Indian activism, such as Kandukuri Veeresalingam and his Rajamundry Widow Remarriage Association of the 1870s.
There are fascinating details about little-known women activists in other fields. The redoubtable Hari Methrani, leader of Calcutta’s Dalit sanitation workers, shamed male striker-breakers in 1928, and put the colonial police to flight by throwing pots of excreta over them. Less well-known Muslim women activists also feature. Begum Hazrat Mahal, wife of the Awadh Nawab, personally led an attack on the Lucknow garrison in 1857. The remarkable Bengali intellectual Rokeya Hussain depicted a feminist utopia in her 1905 book “Sultana’s Dream”, which offered a powerful critique of the violence and aggression historically associated with masculine rulership.
The striking new problematisation of gender roles in colonial India also prompted change in the sphere of “culture”. Vernacular fiction, particularly in popular periodical literature, made it possible to imagine new versions of domesticity. Autobiographies and biographies enabled writers at many social levels to reconstruct the complex life-worlds of their own experience. The depiction of cruel personal relationships suggested new moral identities, as in Tagore’s sympathetic depiction of a woman driven to leave her abusive husband and family. Nor, Sarkar argues, were these developing cultural spaces available only to the literate middle classes. New performance genres drew much wider audiences, including audiences of women.
In towns and villages, the folk performance medium of Nautanki drew on much older oral forms, such as the songs of Bhojpuri women marking the turning of the seasons and key occasions during the ritual year. Urban audiences for popular theatre found their imaginations stirred with new desires, ambitions and resentments, which entered their repertoires of the socially possible.
This sense of the complex balance of forces lies at the heart of Sarkar’s approach. Even when the weight of convention might have seemed most daunting, the historian should be alive to the spaces where men and women were able to imagine new possibilities, to find small weaknesses and fractures in apparently impregnable institutions. Vernacular literatures may have pushed very conventional images of women, but women gained new skills from their reading and a broadened sense of the community to which they belonged.
Women’s participation in nationalist politics limited them largely to “feminine” roles, but their very experience of action in the public domain marked an irreversible change in their consciousness. During the late colonial period, women’s political associations ultimately subordinated their feminist concerns to the needs of the united national struggle; however, through these associations, they learned to utilise the language of equal rights, justice, and equality in their own battles.
Unless we attend to these seemingly hesitant and fleeting moments of possibility, Sarkar argues, we cannot account for the post-colonial emergence of Indian feminism in the strong forms that it came to take from the 1960s. Nor can we understand the transformative intellectual break by which women, as well as men, came to be understood as right-bearing individuals.
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These emphases on the key role of religion and the continuing challenge of conservative values run through the later sections of the book dealing with independent India, Pakistan and Bangladesh through to the 1980s. Personal laws still exist in all of them. Personal laws continue to be the fulcrum around which gender, politics and religion are held together in tension, making it difficult to move decisively beyond the issues which lay at the heart of the struggles of the colonial period.
In India, for example, the fateful decision to open the Babri Masjid site to Hindu worshippers took place in the wake of the Shah Bano affair, when Rajiv Gandhi sought to conciliate conservative Hindu opinion after conceding Muslim leaders’ demand that Islamic law should continue to determine the maintenance that a divorced Muslim wife could expect from her husband.
In the wake of the global political realignment following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, sixth-President of Pakistan General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq looked to strengthen his support amongst religious conservatives in the country through his Hudood Ordinances, which removed the legal protections that women had enjoyed under colonial law, and in effect re-masculinised Pakistan’s public sphere after the gains of the 1960s.
Independent Bangladesh’s remarkable record of economic growth, and the strength in particular of its garment industry enabled women to enter the industrial workforce in a way not seen elsewhere across the subcontinent. But the era of military rule from the mid-1970s was also accompanied by an Islamisation of state laws, particularly those affecting women, and the elevation of Islamic over Bengali identities.
In our own era of Donald Trump’s America, of the rise of Christian nationalism in some eastern European states, and close ties between the Russian Orthodox church and the regime of Vladimir Putin in Russia, the strength of conservative religion across the subcontinent no longer looks like an aberrant failure of secularisation, but rather closer to a global norm.
Yet questions remain about the particular modern resilience, across the subcontinent, of conservative religious values in the field of gender. In such a capacious book as this, it seems churlish to ask for further discussion of particular topics. If a further question could be asked, it would be for a closer look at the remarkable tenacity of Hindu India’s culture of son-preference and the linked, still-vital principle of hypergamous or “anuloma” marriage.
Here, of course, “religious” considerations become difficult to separate from calculations of social advantage for the family as a collective, in which sons and daughters are seen to have very different roles and the marriages a family makes may bring important opportunities for its upward mobility. Some further exploration of this still-flourishing nexus between the religious and the social might yield further insights into the longevity of Hindu India’s conservatism in matters of gender. Yet that, perhaps, would necessitate a further, and rather different study. In the meantime, scholars, students and the informed general reader will find the very richest of feasts in Sarkar’s new book now before them.
Rosalind O’Hanlon is an early modern historian and specialist in the colonial history of India. She is a retired Professor in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford.