Review Article

The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India

Tarini Bedi

Chad M. Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008. 276 pages. Kalyani Devaki Menon, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 224 pages. Atreyee Sen, Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 220 pages. Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadås.s, Memory, and Modernity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 313 pages. What is the fate of Hindu religio-ideological orders when interrogated from the margins of caste, class, gender, and sexuality? How do Hindu women and lower-caste Hindus reshape dominant notions of identity in their communities even as they live within the structural constraints imposed by religious and socio-cultural orders? How do these religiocultural orders adapt to and encompass these various forms of marginality and agency—aesthetic agency (Davesh Soneji), counter-violence International Journal of Hindu Studies 18, 3: 493–501 © 2014 Springer DOI 10.1007/s11407-014-9164-8

494 / Tarini Bedi (Atreyee Sen), dissonance (Kalyani Devaki Menon), and conversion and low-caste agency (Chad M. Bauman)? Finally, how do these varying expressions from the margins engage with colonial and post-colonial states to produce modern, cosmopolitan, and autonomous subjects? These are the questions that these four books collectively engage. All four authors provide nuanced contemporary (Sen, Menon, Soneji) and historical discussions (Bauman, Soneji) of the ways in which Hindu and gendered subjects inhabit spaces on the margins and assert shifting religious, cultural, and gendered identities within varying colonial, religious, and electoral contexts. All four also clearly show that Hindu religious identities, particularly those on the margins of gender and caste, have been and continue to be fragmented, unstable, and contingent. Further, it is here on the margins that all four authors are able to identify various expressions and possibilities of creative action as subjects engage with affective, colonial, nationalist, and Hindu majoritarian states. Menon and Sen are anthropologists who tackle these questions through rich ethnography. The success with which Hindu nationalist politics has been able to mobilize women has been a vexing question for scholars and feminist activists alike. Against the background of troubling anti-Muslim violence and the communalization of Indian public culture by the politics of Hindutva, both Menon and Sen provide illuminating insights into how different women negotiate discourses of violence differently. Menon focuses on women of the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, Durga Vahini, Matri Shakti, and Mahila Morcha; Sen focuses on women of the Shiv Sena’s Mahila Aghadi. Both explore the ways in which women of the Hindu right have carved out spaces of influence for themselves through strategic co-option and resistance to normative notions of Hindu religiosity and anti-Muslim violence. Both works wonderfully complicate the assumptions about women’s symbolic place within organizations of the Sangh Parivar. They do so by showing how women at the grassroots of Hindu nationalist affiliated organizations and political parties animate a variety of new tactics that successfully expand the reach and the definition of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Bauman is a historian who traces the complicated history of conversions through the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in Chhattisgarh through a rich historical archive. This archive that focuses on the low-caste Satnåmpanth suggests that the lived experience of religious

Review Article: The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India / 495 conversions and the intercourse between different religious traditions is a shifting terrain driven by several agents, not least those who convert. Further, Bauman’s work is an important illumination of the ways in which low-caste Hindu identities have been tremendously effective in shaping political and religious life and in reshaping missionary impulses in a region of India where low-caste Camårs have been historically dominant. How do these four works collectively go about tackling their subjects? Soneji’s work is a wonderful and rare example of the ways in which ethnographic and historical methods can be successfully combined. He uses several methods of inquiry in his research. He draws from the methods of history, performance studies, ethnomusicology, and ethnography. While he traces the aesthetic genealogy of devadås dance over two hundred years of South Indian history, he also incorporates some remarkable stories and actual embodied performative “gestures” from contemporary, living devadåss, hereditary dancers who recount the secular aspects of their expressive and performance styles. These secular and aesthetic dimensions of devadås identity are what Soneji suggests have been almost entirely erased from the historical archive since they do not conform to revivalist religious histories of dance in contemporary South India. In this sense Soneji’s use of ethnography undergirds both method and theory; the histories of devadåss remain unfinished because the aesthetic lives of the majority of hereditary dancers live only in the memories and in the bodies of those who still remain on the margins of contemporary South Indian society. The dance and performance itself has been co-opted by elites and reframed to signify a particular urban modernity, while those who were agents of its complicated historical development have been erased because their non-conjugal, lower-caste lifestyles did not conform to the upper-caste, nationalist, and post-colonial notions of the modern. Soneji argues that contrary to dominant notions in extant scholarly and public accounts, devadåss cannot be seen either as a stable category of identity (28) or as one that is exclusively associated with Hindu temple cultures. Much of this instability has revolved around the contentious status of women who have traditionally occupied non-conjugal roles. Soneji links work on politics, aesthetics, and sexuality to explore the shifting constructions of the devadås category from the nineteenth-century Tanjore court, to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial and nationalist period, and then finally to the “reform” period where moral

496 / Tarini Bedi discourses on devadåss’ non-conjugal lives led to the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of 1947. He argues that the irony of the state’s intervention with the passing of this 1947 Act was that it marginalized the vast number of women who were hereditary performers but succeeded in bringing men from the devadås community into electoral politics in South India. In the last section of the book, Soneji focuses on the stories of living devadåss who live in poverty and with stigma, as classical music and dance have been reinvented as the domain of middleclass Brahmins in urban South India. Soneji successfully departs from the dominant cultural histories of devadåss that link the women and their dance traditions exclusively to Hindu temples and temple cultures. He argues that devadåss cannot be seen simply as religious subjects. Therefore, he delinks the devadås subject from her Hindu religious identity and focuses instead on her aesthetic identity and her place within the broader community of professional artists in both colonial and contemporary South India. He suggests that the social and aesthetic lives of devadåss have to be understood through their identifications as professional artists (10). He convincingly shifts the lens of analysis of devadåss from one that privileges religion, to one that privileges performance and aesthetics. He argues that temple dance was only one of many forums of performance for devadåss. Just as significant, if not more, was the role they played as professional entertainers, courtesans, and participants in court rituals and political campaigns. They were, therefore, critical cultural and cosmopolitan agents of modernity rather than simply vessels of religious symbolism. However, like the women of the Hindu right who are subjects of Menon’s and Sen’s ethnographies, Soneji’s female artists often privilege their religious identities during periods of upheaval in order to gain and preserve certain rights and advantages. However, all three authors concur that (Hindu) religious identifications are constantly shifting in ways that enable intermittent, agentive spaces for Hindu women. It is with these various agentive possibilities that Menon’s book is most concerned. Menon provides a rich ethnography of women of several Hindu-right affiliated organizations in contemporary Delhi. The political context of the Råmjanmabh¨mi controversy, anti-Christian mobilization focused on the contemporary debate over Hindu conversions to Christianity, and the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies to the center-

Review Article: The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India / 497 stage of electoral politics form the background to the study. In this sense, Menon’s book is a very valuable addition to the broader literature on Hindu nationalist politics and its violent electoral and political consequences in post-colonial India. Menon’s book, like Sen’s, is particularly valuable as an addition to the extant literature on Hindu nationalist women that has more recently succeeded in illuminating the interplay between the various constituents within its fold. In this sense the book departs in important ways from the broader scholarship on the spectacular, maledominated strategies of Hindutva. Instead, Menon is far more interested in the everyday life—or what she refers to as “everyday acts” (3)—of the Hindu nationalist movement. The everyday acts that Menon sees as critical to the sustenance and expansion of Hindu nationalism among women are historical narratives and iconographies, plural interpretations of religious texts by sådhvs or female renouncers, social work and service in the community, and organized games, exercise, and play. She, therefore, conducts her nuanced ethnography in women’s homes, in public spaces, in hospitals and clinics where they conduct their service and “social work,” and in the training camps (çivir) where younger recruits into the movement are taught to cultivate a shared sense of Hindu nationalist community through games, lectures, and vigorous physical exercise (Chapter 5). The Hindu nationalist movement or the politics of Hindutva in contemporary India has succeeded in recruiting and mobilizing women in unprecedented ways. It has been increasingly recognized that one of the most striking features of right-wing women is that their subjectivities are often constructed out of a well-negotiated system of “double standards.” Menon argues that much of the success and expansion of the Hindu nationalist movement in India is that it has been able to embrace what she refers to as “dissonant subjects”: women who do not accept the violence associated with the movement, but who strategically engage in other everyday strategies of care, maternal heroism, and service or seva to carve out spaces of influence for themselves and their communities within the movement. Menon argues that Hindu nationalist politics has successfully expanded from the peripheries to the center of Indian politics to produce hegemony precisely because it has been able to encompass these plural and shifting identifications (17). For Menon, women in the movement have been very particular agents of this plurality and dissonance. The women in Menon’s book are consistently making decisions about which norms of the movement may

498 / Tarini Bedi be transgressed and which ones may not. A key arena of dissonance for women is over the use of violence. This dissonance forces all kinds of compromises on ideological purity in the everyday life of the Hindu nationalist movement; and according to Menon, this is how the movement has gained its dominance (158–59). If Soneji is concerned with the constitution of subjects through the lens of aesthetics, both Sen and Menon are concerned with subject positions constituted out of discursive positions that are made meaningful through often competing ideological positions. Both are interested in strategies and tactics that are affective, aesthetic, political, and ideological at different political and historical points. While Menon’s ethnography is largely focused on middle class and upper-caste Hindu women, Sen’s ethnography of women in the Shiv Sena’s Mahila Aghadi focuses on poor, working-class women in the Bombay slums. Shiv Sena is a political party active in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. It has been electorally allied with parties of the Hindu right and has used violence and militancy as one of its key strategies in dominating urban space in Mumbai and electoral politics in the state of Maharashtra. For Sen’s subjects, the clash between Hindus and Muslims in Bombay’s slums is closely undergirded by the jostle over limited land in the city. Therefore, Hindutva and communal politics is a lived experience of competition over spatial resources rather than a purely ideological project. Here Sen suggests that communal rivalries are often produced out of spatial rather than dramatic religio-ideological differences in these precarious urban spaces to produce discursive violence and new political subjects (61). For example, one of the core ideological motivators of Hindutva violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s was the reclaiming of the birthplace of Råma from the Muslims. For Shiv Sena, there was an interesting merging of Hindutva interests at the national level with the local interests of reclaiming residential land from Muslim neighbors in Bombay’s slums (71). While Menon illustrates the ways in which women of the Hindu right produce dissonance within the movement by eschewing the violent aspects of the movement, Sen argues that women of the Shiv Sena’s Mahila Aghadi discursively and deliberately militarize their social settings in these contexts of spatial precarity. These are poor women who live in environments of habituated violence. Violence of all kinds is deeply embedded in their everyday lives; domestic violence, rape, workplace

Review Article: The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India / 499 violence, and state violence expressed through the destruction and demolition of slums are rampant here (66–67). Rather than passively accepting these routinized forms of violence, Shiv Sena women have created a feminine space of violent action, where violence is rationalized in terms of “necessity” and “urgency” (54). Therefore, Shiv Sena women have produced a flexible but assertive form of Hindu nationalism, where women’s honor is tied not to religious or moral norms, but instead to women’s autonomy and women’s capacity to act through what Sen calls counter-violence or speedy justice in urban environments. Reading Sen and Menon together is remarkably illuminating. While they are both concerned with women of the Hindu right, they illustrate how differently the various organizations within the movement behave. Most importantly they pare apart the different work that religio-ideological positions perform for different women. Together, the books show us that despite the efforts of male dominated, mediated imaginaries of Hindutva to produce coherence within the movement, in fact the everyday life of Hindu nationalist politics suggests otherwise. Hindutva in its everyday lived experience is not a unitary voice. It has multiple, gendered positions, discrepancies, and even various forms of agency built into it (Sen, 182). Finally, Bauman’s book on the interactions between Christianity and the Satnåmpanth in colonial Chhattisgarh adds to the provocations raised by Sen, Menon, and Soneji about ideological purity and about subjects that shift between religious and secular modes of being. Bauman examines the history of the Satnåmpanth, a community of low-caste Hindus in Chhattisgarh and their engagement with Christian missionary and nationalist politics. The Satnåmpanth was founded in the early nineteenth century by Guru Ghås9dås, who was a low-caste Camår. By the late nineteenth century almost all Camårs in Chhattisgarh had joined this community of followers and called themselves Satnåm9s. Christian missionaries who entered the region in the late nineteenth century found that they had to make several accommodations with the existing Satnåm9 tradition in order to successfully spread their “Christian” message. Bauman argues that while only a small number of Satnåm9s actually converted to Christianity in this region, the kind of Christianity that emerged in Chhattisgarh was deeply influenced by the Satnåm9 traditions already extant here. The book traces the emergence of this Satnåm9-Christian identity as it emerged through the debates and conversations between Satnåm9s and Christians

500 / Tarini Bedi from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. While Bauman’s book is a historical study of the religious unrest and the accommodations between a non-classical, bhakti-influenced Hinduism among lower-caste Hindus in Chhattisgarh, it also contributes a great deal to the more contemporary debates over conversion. Bauman, Menon, and Sen all show that religion and nationalism are conjoined in the public culture of India; therefore the Hindu right sees conversions to Christianity as anti-national. While Sen and Menon are concerned with the ways in which women utilize notions of Hindu religiosity in varying ways to carve out spaces of autonomy and agency for themselves, Bauman’s work engages with those points in religious debates when the lines between religions that are otherwise seen as antithetical simply cease to exist (26). This blurring of boundaries between one religious tradition and another is at the very core of the constitution of what became the Satnåm5-Christian identity in Chhattisgarh. Bauman’s study describes how Satnåm5Christians reworked Satnåm5 oral traditions so that they wove together with elements of a Christian story. Moreover, missionaries themselves were active participants in this Satnåm5-Christian myth-making where continuities between Christianity and a Satnåm5 past were stressed. In this sense, Bauman’s work might be seen as a study of Indian or nonWestern Christianity as much as it is an exploration of a Hindu path of community that emerged as a response to upper-caste domination in rural India. In the case of colonial and early post-colonial Chhattisgarh, the kind of Christianity produced is deeply embedded in all of the shifting forces of low-caste social unrest, anti-Bråhma~ism, colonization, extant bhakti traditions, and missionary activity in the area. And in the end, it is clear that Bauman counters what has become the dominant notion of Hindu nationalist politics: that conversion is an uncontested process of “Christianization” and “colonization.” Instead, like all the other authors here who interrogate the complexities and negotiations between subjects and religious, political, and gendered authority, Bauman suggests that conversion is never a static, top-down, or singular process. In the case of Satnåm5s in Chhattisgarh, conversions and the resultant Satnåm5-Christian identity were almost always driven by machinations between missionaries, Satnåm5s, and the colonial and later the nationalist state. Bauman, like all the other three authors here, closely engages with the ways in ways in which notions of “womanhood” became integral to the

Review Article: The Everyday Politics of Hindu Lives in India / 501 ways in which Satnåm1-Christians shaped their modernity in the twentieth century. Here he argues that while Satnåm1-Christians did assimilate the values and practices of missionaries, they also called upon upper-caste Hindu notions of respectable womanhood. Modern political and religious identities, therefore, depended quite critically on both Victorian ideals as well as on upper-caste Hindu ones. These conjunctions and slippages further illustrate what lies at the core of all the four works here: that the everyday politics of Hindu lives incorporate and encompass a wide variety of affective, political, and ideological positions; and subjects traverse these positions to intermittently produce new forms of subjectivity and politics. While it may seem that these four books would have vastly different audiences, I would argue that reading them together is very beneficial for those interested in looking at Hindu religiosity from the margins and across the disciplines. All four books ultimately go a long way in destabilizing what are usually assumed to be fixed categories of identification but that in practice operate in very particular ways in India: devadås, Hindu nationalist, convert, Hindu, and Christian.

TARINI BEDI is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois. [email protected]