10 Religion and Identity

Nandita Dhawan

epgp books

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

How do religions create identities – individual, community, political, cultural, and social? Are these identities constructed by religion only? What is the primacy of religion in our lives? We know religion is not an inert and self-standing concept and neither are identities fixed. These are both linked to various social, political and economic processes. So, why do religious identities become more important than primordial ties of kinship, region, custom, class, occupation, etc.? How does one differentiate between religious faith and politics? The syllabus will use the gender lens to look at some of the major issues in this context ranging from ideology to practices, sacred to profane, nationalism to secularism, and individual to the institution. The focus will be primarily on India and the challenges we face with regard to the issue of religion and identity. The first section will study religion in the context of faith, belief and ethics where religion is looked upon as an intimate relationship of an individual with the divine. It will also look at how women have been bearers of religious tradition and rituals despite the inherent gender inequality in different religions. The students will also get an idea about the presence of women ascetics in religions, and their marginalization in the ascetic world of different religions. The second unit will focus on the process of crisis of secularism. The objective is to make the students understand the legal definition of religious communities, and the rise of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ communities in the context of nationalism. The third section focuses on the role of the state in constructing religious identities and its politics. It moves from the conflicts between nationalism and secularism in colonial times to issues of personal laws. The political situation in India has taken a different turn from the 1980s with rising caste and community violence and the ensuing mandir-masjid debates. The fourth section focuses on the processes of communalism and fundamentalism in the context of partition history, communal violence, and women and fundamentalism.

 

SECTION 1

 

Religion, Ethics and Morality

 

a.            Religion: Sacred and profane, public and private

b.          Women in religion; Women and religion: bearers of religious tradition, victims of religious inequality

 

Religion: Sacred and profane, public and private

 

Emile Durkheim defined religion as, ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church all those who adhere to them’ (Madan 1991: 2). The concepts of the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are central to Emile Durkheim’s theory of religion. The distinctive trait of religious thought is that the world is divided into two domains – one containing all that is sacred, and the other containing all that is profane. The sacred is always separated from all other objects, and embodies not only gods, spirits and natural things, but beliefs, practice and rites as well. This reminds us of the structure of the hierarchical caste system in India originating from Hinduism, where it is only the brahmans who are eligible to perform certain rites. The ‘profane’, according to Durkheim, is subordinate in dignity to the sacred and therefore seen as radically opposite to the sacred. It is the everyday, the common place, the utilitarian and the mundane aspects of life, which is made up of sensations coming from the physical world and of vulgar things that interest only our physical individualities. It is in this regard that according to Durkheim, despite being so profoundly differentiated, the profane is the principle with the capacity to contaminate the sacred. There are existing rules which regulate the separation between the two and precautions must be taken when they come in contact. The sacred and profane thus represent a unifying principle which separates the natural from the spiritual world. This provides society with a model of binaries such as good and evil, pure and polluted, holy and defiled, and so on. According to this binary, the politics of religion including its gender politics and violence will be placed in the domain of the profane, which should be separated from the sacred. In the contemporary global settings and prevalence of communal violence around religious identities, one has to exercise great caution in applying this idea and in accepting the validity of the opposition between sacred and profane. Moreover, there exist varied diversities among Indian religions. Indian religions like Buddhism and Jainism are atheistic. The four ‘noble Truths’ of Buddhism, for example, which are regarded as the core of the Buddha’s teaching are divorced from the idea of divinity. The indifference to the divine in both Buddhism and Jainism, according to Durkheim, was derived from Brahmanism, where the numerous divinities merged themselves into an impersonal and abstract deity – the supreme reality – contained within man himself.

 

Religions of India

 

Hinduism is the oldest religion in the country. A direct descendent of Brahmanism, it is the Vedic religion more than 3000 years old, which has the maximum number of followers. Jainism and Buddhism were born around the same time, 2500 years ago, in north India. Vardhamana Mahavira, founder of Jainism, carried to its fruition an already existing tradition of dissent originating much before his time in the sixth century BC. Siddhartha Gautama, a more innovative and radical dissenter, the founder of Buddhism is said to have attained ‘enlightenment’ in c.528 BC. Though there is a tradition that Christianity was brought to India by the Apostle Thomas within living memory of Jesus Christ, documentary evidence of its presence is present only in the sixth century.1 The religion of Islam came to India two centuries later. There were the Zoroastrians and the Jews who arrived as well. The youngest Indian religion is Sikhism, the faith taught by Guru Nanak at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

 

Women in religion; Women and religion: bearers of religious tradition, victims of religious inequality

 

Women form an inherent part of the family as well as integral part of religious communities. Though personal laws are different for different religions, they are all discriminatory towards women. This is not surprising given the patriarchal nature of families as well as religious communities. They are symbolic figures for communities, especially during moments of real and conceived crisis. For many women, religion is an individual equation of divine faith with their god. They live and inhabit religious norms and follow religious rituals without any external social imposition. A religious act can be equated with an act of ‘genuine faith’, which is not

 

1  This is according to the tradition of the Thomas Christians of South India.

 

merely a doctrine but a source of energy to nurture their lives. The affective, ethical and sensible capacities of women are highlighted in their acts of religious faith and they have often derived their primary identity via religious preoccupation. Women are seen as devotees who use the mythical characteristics of religion and its ritual resources to construct an autonomous cultural space for themselves, which provides them with the scope to wrest some relief and power from patriarchy. Thus, there is no reason to interpret religious assiduity in terms of submission or lack of agency.

 

In Hinduism’s ascetic traditions, the male renouncer has a conventional image, where the emphasis is on celibacy, Vedic learning and solitude. It is these characteristics of asceticism that make it least hospitable to women. There exists a persistent tension between the socially approved norms of women’s responsible involvement with family life and the value of ascetic withdrawal from society for attaining liberation. Women do not constitute the community, they belong to it. It is the men who lead patriarchal families and communities. The membership of women is conditional to pre-existing rules, practices, conventions, definitions, and meanings. If they are obedient and loyal they are rewarded, else they are punished and expelled. There exists a gendered opposition between renunciation and the life of a householder. To become an ascetic, the woman has to initiate by rejecting the role of the good and virtuous wife, thereby facing opposition from family and friends. While the male acetic makes a choice between two ideals in life equally allowed for him, the female ascetic is different in having renounced the single mode of life set for her and by adopting a behavior intended for their male counterparts (Ojha 1981: 256). Men are glorified for renouncing their wives for the sake of God, while the wife is expected to show unquestioning submissiveness to her husband. Moreover, women and their religious practices are a part of the ‘private’ unlike men who are authorized to participate in the ‘public’. Within misogynist and religious ascetic traditions, women ascetics have faced opposition from their male peers. The behaviour of women ascetics has been viewed as deviant or even dangerous. While Buddhism and Jainism have challenged and ridiculed Vedic ritualism and casteism, they continue to echo Hindu canons in their anti-women expressions, by describing their nature as dangerous. However, women renouncers have created a space and opportunities for themselves within this male space.

 

Buddhism and Jainism have opened the doors of monastic living to women, serving as entry points by establishing special monasteries for women which were well-organised according to the rules prescribed in their codes of monastic life. Hindu female asceticism, on the other hand, has largely remained unstructured with no feminine version of monastic organisation and an absence of homogeneity. The bhakti movement enabled women to break the chains of canonical traditions, orthodoxy and conventions which limited women’s right to transcendence. Spiritual women shattered the binaries of the good woman-chaste wife-sacrificing mother and the bad woman-public woman-prostitute. As a seeker of transcendence, the woman saint made the unacceptable acceptable by rejecting marriage and motherhood. There was a strong historical presence of the ideologically marginalised ascetic women. Bhakti movements were social movements where early Bhaktas did not necessarily come from the poorest classes, but they later began to enlist people from all strata of society including different castes and occupations, providing democratic access to God. The people from lower order of society and women found a way to counter their exclusion from the Hindu upper caste ritual order and to escape the stigma they were otherwise forced to live with.

 

SECTION 2

 

Crisis of Secularism

 

a.      Colonial history of India: ‘Communities’ to ‘religious communities’

 

Of the total population of India in 2001, Hindus constituted 80.5 per cent while Muslims accounted for 13,4 per cent. Christians formed 2,3 per cent of the total population while Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains were 1.9 per cent, 0.8 per cent and 0.4 per cent respectively. The other religions constituted 0.6 per cent of the Indian population. According to the 2011 census, while Hindus comprised 78.35 per cent of the total population, Muslims account for 14.2 per cent and the share of Christians and Sikhs were a little above 2 per cent as in the range of the 2001 census.

 

It was the colonial bureaucratic rationality of India which was responsible for the creation of religious identity as a political category. In the colonial understanding of the Indian subcontinent, according to Gyanendra Pandey (1990), religious self-identification in the society was considered a permanent and fundamental condition. This helped the British with the master strategy of divide-and-rule and served their interests of managing and governing colonized Indians. The colonial rulers created dissension and competition between Hindus and Muslims to prevent their alignment against British rule. This representation of the colonized by religious identification elided the internally differentiated character of communities, which were based on say, caste, sect, etc. It further ignored the historically changing dimensions of communities as they faced new contexts and conflicts. Communities were ‘fixed’ by two major colonial initiatives: (i) census operations organized around religion and caste as the crucial determinants of Indian society, and (ii) installation of separate electorates and forms of representation. This was a product of the Minto-Morley Reforms (1909), reinforced by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (1919) and the Government of India Act (1935), which consolidated and politicized competing communal identities. Thus, heterogeneously formed ‘communities’ were transformed to ‘religious communities’, and certain chosen features, customs and not others were applied fundamentally in creating these religious identities.

 

b.      Religious communities and nationalism: ‘majority’ and ‘minority’

 

Colonial policies caused divisions and hostility between different religions and cultures leading to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The latter was also caused by the certain assumption held by the majority of the Congress leadership that national solidarity was essentially a quality of India’s (Hindu) cultural tradition, which led to generation of fear and defensiveness among Muslims and their demand and drive for a separate nation. For instance, Congress leaders such as Gandhi had accepted the idea of separate representation of Muslims by way of concession, as for them, the minority or communal question had no connection with the question of nationalism; it was one for nationalism to overcome. For others like Jinnah and Ambedkar, the resolution of the minority question was at the heart of the problem as that would decide the place that minorities would have in India. Pandey (ibid) has pointed out that the Khilafat movement (1920-22), when anticolonial resistance was organised with the Muslim at the centre of the nation, was the last moment in Indian nationalism when the nation and community were not opposed to each other; that moment saw India as a nation composed of communities. But soon after the movement, Gandhi went back to his earlier position imbricating the question of religious difference within an opposition between nationalism and communalism. It was through the 1930s and 40s that the Muslim became a symbol of unassimilable difference, one who questioned the nationalist attribution of singularity to the nation. While Gandhi believed that India would integrate Muslims in the organic unity of the nation as a family, Nehru was of the opinion that modernisation would erase the ‘backwardness’ of the Muslims as they would be assimilated in the national mainstream. Prakash (2007) thus argues that the projection of the Muslim as an Other and the Constitution of the modern Indian nation state were related projects, with one implying the other. The Indian Muslims were finally rendered a minority in independent India, a minority that the liberal nation-state under the leadership of Nehru pledged to tolerate. Partition led to the Congress refusing to reserve seats and separate electorates for any minority based on religion and faith; they went back on their promise of making Hindustani a national language and nominated Hindi in its place. Thus, while Britishers continued to perpetuate their policy of divide and rule on communal lines, the Congress used religious idioms, specifically Hindu, to represent its ‘secular’ demands. They, however, claimed to represent the cause of ‘Indian’ nationalism as against the communal nationalism of the Muslim League or of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS).

 

3. Religion and State: Identity politics

 

a. Personal laws

 

All the four religious communities, namely, the majority Hindu, and the minority Muslim, Christian, and Parsi communities, have their separate personal laws. Other religious groups such as Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, tribals and scheduled castes are all subsumed under the Hindu personal law. Personal laws operate in matters relating to inheritance, marriage, divorce, maintenance, and adoption. This is because these are regarded as ‘personal’ issues, related to matters within the ‘private’ sphere of the family. All personal laws reinforced the patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal family. The operation of separate personal laws for different religious communities in India is a legacy of British colonial administration as well. The British administration made distinctions between personal and other spheres of laws, derived from the ancient distinction between territorial and personal laws. They did not interfere with personal laws, which have the following salient features. They are attached to an individual at birth. Personal laws control and regulate social relations in ‘private’ sphere and these laws are specific to and separate for particular religious communities. They are perceived as a means of securing community identity and respecting religious difference. Personal laws therefore operate within rather than despite a constitutional commitment to the secularism of the Indian state. Any proposed reform or removal of personal laws becomes a fraught issue and is perceived as a threat to community identity and/or traditional patriarchal arrangements. Personal laws were codified for administrative convenience, even by overriding or fixing customary laws. They did not necessarily have scriptural sanction. These codifications involve not just a specific interpretation of each religion but also the incorporation of the assumptions of colonial administrators and native representatives (Mani 2010). Communities are far more heterogeneous with permeable boundaries, their norms are much more flexible and overlapping than the political categorization done by the state would expect us to believe. While all communities were expected to be governed by their own religious personal laws, Hindu Personal Laws were codified after independence. Nehru brought codification of Hindu Personal Laws in four legislations: (i) Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, (ii) Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956, (iii) Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956, and (iv) Hindu Succession Act, 1956.2 All these legislations were discriminatory against women and were still passed after a great deal of opposition (Parashar 1992). However, personal laws of other religions were not codified when the process of secular reform to abolish all personal laws for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) prior to independence was scuttled on the grounds of political expediency.

 

It is important to note that 1980s was a decade of the rise in communal conflicts, majority and minority fundamentalism, caste wars, and regional separatist movements. The vision of a homogeneous nation had been fractured. On the one hand, a nationwide debate was raised regarding the Shah Bano controversy when the Supreme Court gave Shah Bano a life-long maintenance vide 125CrPC thereby violating Shariat Law and interfering in the Muslim Personal Laws. The Hindu Right’s claim for a UCC, citing the Shah Bano case, posed a challenge to the feminists as the former claimed that it was the majority community members who were proper citizens, and the Muslims choice to not implement a UCC made them anti-national and unpatriotic. Thus, UCC became a site of both desire and threat, with the desire to achieve unity and homogeneity of the nation, and the threat to minorities as their claims to particularity were in danger of being subsumed by claims to a homogeneous nation. The UCC was by no way a means of achieving gender equality for communities. The Muslim opposition to UCC was obvious as it

2 Hindu personal law was interpreted initially in 1722 when Warren Hastings appointed ten Brahmin pandits from Bengal to compile a digest of Hindu scriptural law in civil matters. These interpretations were finally codified into one uniform law in 1941. Thus, this code was based on Brahmanical interpretations of Hinduism.

 

threatened the sanctity of their religious laws and hence their religious identity. They were apprehensive that UCC would actually be a version of the Hindu personal law which will be made uniformly applicable to all, and thereby secure Hindu hegemony. During the 1980s, Roop Kanwar’s self-immolation as sati, brought pro-sati and anti-sati women’s groups in confrontation. The latter demonstrations saw both groups shouting the same slogans of women’s empowerment, initiating the process of right-wing appropriation of slogans of the progressive women’s movement after the former’s appropriation of the feminist agenda of the UCC.

 

b. Religion, Caste, Gender: Mandal-Kamandal, Mandir-Masjid debates

 

In the 1970s, there was an emergence of the new social movements3 as well as a challenge to upper caste hegemony over national politics. A small, but vocal political leadership emerged from the lower castes, who had acquired education and entered bureaucracy and other non-traditional occupations, with the help of the reserved policy. It was in the 1980s that the Second Commission for Backward Classes, i.e., the Mandal Commission, proposed to extend reservations in jobs and educational seats to the other backward classes in all states, union territories and at the central government level. On 7 August 1990, the Prime Minister V.P.Singh announced the government’s intention to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, according to which there had to be the inclusion of backward classes (3743 among Hindus) for 27 per cent additional reservation (Jaffrelot 1999, 2003). The proposal was strongly opposed by sections of the upper and intermediate castes, who were a part of the middle class, and who resisted the newly politicised lower castes forcing their way into the middle class white-collar jobs, that too through caste-based reservations and not competition. This resulted in clash of interests between upper and intermediate castes on the one hand and lower castes on the other. There were young middle-class women in Delhi who opposed these reservations as ‘unmarked’ citizens with placards which said, ‘we want employed husbands’.

 

The militant Hindus’ sense of insecurity was heightened by a series of conversions of Scheduled Castes of Meenakshipuram to Islam in 1981. The importance given to the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi issue widened BJP’s electoral base. While the Sangh Parivar strongly

3 There was an emergence of several organizations and fronts in 1970s and early 1980s such as the ShramikMuktiSangathana, Satyashodhak Communist Party, ShramikMukti Dal, YuvakKranti Dal, Dalit Panther, etc. along with the rise of women’s movement.

 

opposed the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, on the one hand, the BJP sought to mobilise lower caste groups and unite fractured Hindu communities under the RJB banner, on the other. This made Kancha Ilaiah (1996: 166) remark cynically, that in the ‘Mandal Yuga (era of Mandal)…[upper caste Hindus] abuse us as meritless creatures, but in their Ramrajya [ideal state] we are defined again as Hindus’. The Mandal-Masjid years in the early 1990s brought forth a completely new political understanding of caste and the word ‘dalit’. The non-brahmanical re-constructions of historiography of modern India have shown the histories of anti-hierarchical, pro-democratising collective objectives of the lower castes which were not highlighted in the dominant narratives of nationalism (Omvedt 1976, 1993, 1994; Rege 1994). In independent India too, the prevailing narrative of nation-building continued, with the assumption that the ‘parochial’ structures of caste, community and tribe and various feudal vestiges would enter into new relationships of secular and political kind. There was a supposition that secularism would undermine communal, religious as well as caste identities and that with equal access to resources, opportunities, and modern education, a single and homogeneous middle class will emerge leading to a new concept of unity based on national identity. The assumptions were proved wrong with the Nehruvian agenda of democratic nation-building and social transformation not being carried through in the desired direction.

 

There were accounts of inter-caste violence at many places and ‘Mandalisation of politics’ resulted not only in radically altering the social bases of politics in India, but also paved the way for complex reformulations of brahmanical patriarchies to counter collective dalit resistance.4 It ended the era of Congress dominated politics of social consensus and many lower caste social groups abandoned the party for their own separate political parties. The categories of the OBCs, SCs and STs, created the administrative need of implementing the reservations policy, and attained a strong political and social status as new socio-economic groups. These groups were interested in gaining political power and the 1980s were marked by the newly exploding caste identity and consciousness. Sheth (1999: 2504) refers to this change in caste consciousness as also being related to a de-ritualisation of caste in post-colonial India which meant ‘delinking of caste from various forms of rituality which bounded it to a fixed status, an occupation and to specific rules of commensality and endogamy’. The newly acquired caste identity had resulted in

4  There were cases for instance, when a dalit agricultural labourer was blamed for dressing ‘too well’, etc. For more details refer Rege 1998.

 

the uprooting of caste from its ritually determined ideological, economic and political contexts and ‘the hierarchically ordered strata of castes functioned as horizontal groups, competing for power and control over resources in society’ (ibid). The caste consciousness was no more dependent on ritual status. It was instead articulated as ‘political consciousness of groups staking claims to power and to new places in the changed opportunity structure’ arising out of the development of a new power system created by elections, political parties and affirmative action of the state (ibid). In addition to this was the existence of multiple patriarchies which leads to discreet caste and overlapping patriarchal arrangements.5

 

The developing political situation in the country around late 80s and early 1990s threw many challenges for the Sangh Parivar. Till the 1980s, the Sangh had defined the Hindus as essentially a ‘homogeneous people’, with the Hindu nationalist movement representing an upper-caste, Brahminical character. The ideal of Akhand Bharat (united India) was perceived by the Hindu Right which believed in universalising the lifestyle and ideals of upper caste Hindus by silencing the plurality of the lower caste lifestyles.6 The political threat to the Hindu Right was further reinforced by a swift dalit upsurge in north India with the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Samata Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in the Hindi belt. A policy of ‘social engineering’ was adopted by the BJP, which aimed at promoting more lower-caste members, especially in the party apparatus of the BJP.7 The BJP undertook electoral alliances with parties representing the lower castes, such as the BSP. Scholars have pointed out ways in which the Hindu Right alliances with ‘lower caste’ parties have harmed the dalit and lower caste cause. The Indian Parliaments passed the 73rd and 74th Amendments thereby introducing one-third (33 per cent) reservations for women in local self-government institutions (rural panchayats and urban local bodies) in 1993.8 The arguments against the bill came from two broad opposing positions— either from opposition in general to reservations or from a premise that reservations for women should be extended to other disempowered groups, i.e., quotas within quotas position.

 

An important turning point for the rise of the Hindu Right politics in India has been the Ramjanmabhoomi (RJB) movement, which laid bare the complex ways in which secularism was

5   This results from the brahmanical refusal to universalise a single patriarchal mode and because of the relation of the caste group to the means for production. Refer Rege 1998; Sangari 1995.

6  Refer  Jaffrelot 2003.

 

7   For further details refer Jaffrelot 2003.

 

8  The Indian Parliament passed the 73rd and 74th Amendment Acts on 22 December 1992.

 

understood, as well as the complex relation between religious faith and politics. The movement launched in March 1984, resolved to take up the issue of Babri Masjid-RJB and wrest control of the Babri mosque site for the construction of a Ram temple.9 The disputed site at Ayodhya was claimed as the actual birthplace of Ram by the Sangh Parivar. They further claimed that a temple had existed there before it was destroyed by Babur and replaced with a mosque. The aim was to evoke the ‘national’ sentiments of the ‘Hindu society’ and have a Ram temple built at the site where the Babri mosque stood. The movement claimed to be independent of any political manipulation and maintained that it was devoted to restoring the birthplace of Ram with a focus on asserting the Hindu faith. This was also the justification given by the participating ascetics for agreeing to spontaneously come forward on the issue of the RJB movement, especially because they had been traditionally always been aloof from the arena of power politics. The Hindu faith, described above, was critiqued by feminists, especially because it claimed to be a faith which was ‘timeless and above historical change and political manipulation’ (Sarkar 1995: 209). They argued that there had been no mention of any urgency to build a temple on the Babri Masjid site in any traditional text, ritual or myth, prior to the RJB movement. Moreover, since it is women who are believed to be custodians of eternal faith and bearers of familial and community tradition, it seemed legitimate for them to respond to this call to preserve the ‘age-old Hindu beliefs’. The Mandal-Masjid years brought with them the fragmentation of the universal category of ‘woman’, when it became impossible to speak of women without reference to class, caste and community.

 

4. Communalism and Fundamentalism

 

a.  Partition history and communal violence

 

b.  Women and fundamentalism

The particularities of Indian partition 1947 can be immediately noted. Several hundred thousand people were estimated to have been killed; innumerable and unaccountable numbers were raped and converted; there were millions who were uprooted and transformed into official ‘refugees’

9 For further details refer Jaffrelot 1999.

due to the riots. Scholars have argued that religion is not the ultimate cause of communal conflict because the core of religion is its quest for ultimate reality which is supra-rational and metaphysical. They have looked at the communal approach as being concerned with things purely mundane, political and economic interests. Hence, vested interests lay at the root of communalism. Moreover, there is enough literature which draws our attention to the existing myth (and the importance of discarding it) of Muslim aggressiveness, and Hindu defensiveness, of Muslim fanaticism and Hindu tolerance. While partition led to realignment of borders and of national and community identities, there was not essentially a realignment of loyalties. Scholars have shown how large number of people chose fidelity to place rather than to religious community; they converted and remained there. There were women who spoke about how they relearnt their roles in a ‘new’ location. Urvashi Butalia focuses on the individual experiences and their private pain in this experience to study on how people on the margins of history have been affected by the upheaval of partition. She shows how at least in private, the voices of partition have not been stilled and the bitterness of the events remains.

 

Partition further made secularism a fraught idea at the time of the framing of the Constitution, and as a result the term ‘secularism’ had to wait till 1976 to enter the Constitution. There were contradictions in the values and actions that secularism was supposed to exemplify after independence premised on an apparent opposition between the ideas of Nehru and Gandhi. In contrast to Nehru’s vision of dharma nirpekshata which was based on the belief to separate religion and politics, Gandhian approach to secularism was based on sarva dharma samabhava— equal respect for all religions (let all religions prosper). It is the Gandhian approach, which has dominated legal and political thought since independence. It does not advocate strict separation between religion and politics, but promotes equality of all religions within political as well as private life. All citizens must have the equal right to freedom of religion, and the state must not discriminate on the basis of religion.

 

The RJB movement discussed above marked a departure from the iconic representation of women as non-violent. Women’s role in inciting communal violence prompted a re-thinking on the ways in which gender provides the ground for the contest between national-political and religious-cultural. Another crucial issue affecting women today is the growth of state sponsored religious fundamentalism, which is evident in the context of increasing violence against women. This is in the form of dowry murders, sexual harassment, rape by state agents (police and army), throwing of acid on women in the streets. A call for return to culture and tradition is always addressed to women first. Family and community honour is thus linked with women. The imagery of communal riots is all about gendered stereotypes, with a Muslim man being one of low morals and uncontrolled lust and a Hindu man being mild, docile and emasculated. This same story applies to all kinds of ‘othering’ be that of a dalit man, an adivasi, etc. There has been a worldwide phenomenon of growing fundamentalist forces. Fundamentalism constructs a particular version of religions as the only valid representation of that religion, allowing little distinction between what is textual and what are local specific cultural practices. For example, while in Pakistan, the islamisation process selects elements from 19 schools of jurisprudence as well as customs and practices that existed in 8th and 9th centuries in what is contemporary Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria. Similarly the ‘Hinduism’ being projected by various Hindu organisations denies the historical existence of two separate and antagonistic religious traditions – Brahmanism10 and Shramanic11. Mani (2010) relates this fundamentalism more to nationalism than to the multiple lived experience of religion in the subcontinent. She critiques the fundamentalists desire to see religion as a ‘codified set of rules and regulations to be unreflectively obeyed rather than broad principles that are discovered as much as they are learned, and whose capacity to inspire depends less on their didactic nature than on their ability to evoke and illumine the possibilities of enriching human life’ (ibid: 11)

 

Conclusion

 

In the present society, it is naïve to limit the study of religion to its structures and its theoretical frameworks without looking into the political identities it creates. Religious faith and its politics are intertwined and the role of the patriarchal institutions such as the family, community and state become important to understand how faith is lived and politicized. Women have been integral constituents of these structures and are also held responsible for carrying the religious tradition and beliefs from one generation to the next. The complex intertwining of religion and

10This was based in Vedic texts and the Dharmashastras, restricted to the upper castes.

 

11  This tradition was popular among lower castes and exhibited a wide diversity in ritual and belief.

politics has seen change in gendered ideologies and practices as well with women becoming agents of communal violence. The paper has been an attempt to point some of these interlinks for the benefit of the students.

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