Mobilizing Religion And Gender In India

Religious nationalists and women’s activists have transformed India over the past century. They debated the idea of India under colonial rule, shaped the constitutional structure of Indian democracy, and questioned the legitimacy of the postcolonial consensus, as they politicized one dimension of identity. Using a historical comparative approach, the book argues that external events, activist agency in strategizing, and the political economy of transnational networks explain the relative success and failure of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement rather than the ideological claims each movement makes. By focusing on how particular activist strategies lead to increased levels of public support, it shows how it is these strategies rather than the ideologies of Hindutva and feminism that mobilize people. Both of these social movements have had decades of great power and influence, and decades of relative irrelevance, and both challenge postcolonial India’s secular settlement – its division of public and private. The book goes on to highlight new insights into the inner dynamics of each movement by showing how the same strategies - grassroots education, electoral mobilization, media management, donor cultivation - lead to similarly positive results. Bringing together the study of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Religion, Gender Studies, and South Asian Politics.

Appropriating Gender explores the paradoxical relationship of women to religious politics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Contrary to the hopes of feminists, many women have responded to religious nationalist appeals; contrary to the hopes of religious nationalists, they have also asserted their gender, class, caste, and religious identities; contrary to the hopes of nation states, they have often challenged state policies and practices. Through a comparative South Asia perspective, Appropriating Gender explores the varied meanings and expressions of gender identity through time, by location, and according to political context. The first work to focus on women's agency and activism within the South Asian context, Appropriating Gender is an outstanding contribution to the field of gender studies.

Religious nationalists and women’s activists have transformed India over the past century. They debated the idea of India under colonial rule, shaped the constitutional structure of Indian democracy, and questioned the legitimacy of the postcolonial consensus, as they politicized one dimension of identity. Using a historical comparative approach, the book argues that external events, activist agency in strategizing, and the political economy of transnational networks explain the relative success and failure of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement rather than the ideological claims each movement makes. By focusing on how particular activist strategies lead to increased levels of public support, it shows how it is these strategies rather than the ideologies of Hindutva and feminism that mobilize people. Both of these social movements have had decades of great power and influence, and decades of relative irrelevance, and both challenge postcolonial India’s secular settlement – its division of public and private. The book goes on to highlight new insights into the inner dynamics of each movement by showing how the same strategies - grassroots education, electoral mobilization, media management, donor cultivation - lead to similarly positive results. Bringing together the study of Hindu nationalism and the Indian women’s movement, the book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Religion, Gender Studies, and South Asian Politics.

"How has the participation of women in Hindu nationalist politics in India changed over time, and what has their changing participation meant for women, for Hindu nationalism, and for Indian democracy? In the wake of the BJP's consolidation of power after the 2019 election, Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated places women's participation in religious politics in India into historical and comparative perspective to understand the critical role of women and gender in the movement's rise and how it has evolved over time. Marginalized, Mobilized, Incorporated draws on significant new data sources, gathered over a decade of fieldwork in India, including newly uncovered archival documents on a women's wing of the Hindu Mahasabha; interviews with key BJP leaders; and ethnographic observation, voting data, and visual campaign materials. I compare three critical time periods to show how Hindu nationalism has increasingly involved women in its politics over time. In its formative years in the early 1900s, Hindu nationalism marginalized women; in the 1980s the BJP mobilized them; and today, the BJP has incorporated women into its structures and activities. Incorporating women into Hindu nationalist politics has significantly advanced the BJP's electoral success compared to prior periods when women were marginalized or mobilized in more limited ways. For the BJP, women's incorporation works to normalize religious nationalism in Indian democracy; however, incorporation has not been emancipatory for women, whose participation in BJP politics remains predicated on traditional gender ideologies that tether women to their social roles in the home and family"--

Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others. Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.

India’s vibrant civil society sector has become a powerful symbol of political participation in the country. It comprises a wealth of media organizations, caste and religion based associations, farmers groups, labor unions, social service organizations, and an almost limitless number of development organizations. Given this vibrancy, it is difficult to grasp the characteristics of civil society at the transnational or even the national level. Delving beneath the progressive surface to the local level, one finds a murky and multifaceted world of competing interests, compromises, uneasy alliances and erratic victories. The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India critically examines the enormous gap between the ways collective action in India is studied and the ways it operates on the ground. It identifies what influences the relative success or failure of different movements; the tools activists use to overcome obstacles; the traps that derail efforts to frame, politicize, and act on certain issues and assumptions about particular forms of action. The authors synthesize the experiences of a number of organizations and movements to identify the most effective tools that civil society actors at all levels can use to achieve positive social change.

On the political role and Hindu sentiments of women members of Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, an Indian political party; articles.