Feminism and the New Middle Class

Having tried to argue that the subject of feminism in India was never single or unitary, I may now be somewhat clearer in explaining how feminist research, through its priorities of representation, contributed toward the shaping of this split subject. When it came to writing about India's economy and society, urban middle class feminists have been insistently foregrounding women from rural, poor, and backward areas in the midst of the struggles of women from their own class. To recall what I said earlier, this privileging of non-middle class and non-urban women needed to be understood against the background of the Nehruvian model of socialism, or, to be more accurate, the failure of its imagined economy.

At least since the mid-eighties, but more completely with the onset of the nineties, however, the social imaginary hitherto sustaining the nation—for its apologists as much as its radicals—has begun to give way. One palpable sign of this fundamental change is that some feminists have been shifting their analytical attention from the flawed policies of development and the repressive measures of the state to a realm much closer to home, perhaps too close for comfort: the sphere of the middle class as part of an ideologically dominant order. It is not that feminists had no initial place in their scholarship for women like themselves. Middle class women's problems found expression in a number of areas, ranging from the law

and family violence to the inflationary rise in consumer prices. The shift has to do with the self-reflexive manner in which the middle class woman is being thematized for the first time. Even more interesting is the fact that, when first self-consciously articulated, she has come to us from the past—to be more specific, from colonial India in the nineteenth century.

By far the most well-known book to have brought her to our attention is the anthology Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History , edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. Writing as the eighties were about to draw to a close, Sangari and Vaid speak of "the obtuseness of the present."^[60] Alongside the more "invisible" (but, I would add, by now also more familiar) economic processes that have marginalized most women, "visible" developments—growing communal conflict, the politicization of religion, the reemergence of a "traditional" practice such as widow immolation in the heart of modern India—appear to have propelled feminists into a new field of inquiry, that of cultural history. According to the editors, this has occurred because history enables the kind of integrated approach to "questions about the inter-relation of patriarchal practices with political economy, religion, law and culture"^[61] that eludes contemporary analysis.

In their remarkable introduction, Sangari and Vaid display a compelling desire to provide the fullest possible picture and represent women across different classes and communities. It is a serious limitation to them, therefore, that the essays in the collection focus mainly on the middle class and always on the Hindu community. As they rightly insist, "it is not possible to understand a dominant class or religious community without locating its relationship to other strata or religious groups."^[62] However true these observations might be, in terms of the perspective I am trying to make room for they are also misleading. To begin with, only six of the ten essays are biased in favor of the middle class, and just three carry out their analysis without active reference to women from other groups. But more to the point, might not the explicit emphasis on middle class women, the direct focus placed on the "self," be what is most innovative about these historical essays?

Let me even suggest that part of the "obtuseness" of the present

relates to the extreme difficulty of examining one's own class in sufficient detail when that class has, until very recently, been surreptitiously functioning as the norm. Within the Nehruvian imaginary, the middle class marked itself as modern, privileged, and elite. So also feminists eager to represent India's women—in the villages, at the wrong end of development, suffering the injustices of the state or the limitations of leftist politics and so on—have been doing so while rendering their own identities within the dominant culture largely transparent. In the two examples we looked at, both the members of Stree Shakti Sanghatana and Saradamoni locate themselves in their respective texts through processes of identification with women from rural backgrounds whose class positions were often at variance with their own.

Now, in contrast, the past framing the Sangari-Vaid essays provides the context for a discussion of the "new woman" who emerged at the interface of colonial subjection and an incipient nationalism and who, ironically enough, may not always be feminists' preferred choice in constructing a lineage. We are told about the shaping of a newly reinvented Hindu-Aryan identity, a modern Indian spirituality and quest for tradition, middle class respectability, and the cultivation of a tasteful ethnicity over against lower class depravity, all of which were critically predicated upon "our" female ancestors.

If these genealogical excavations undertaken in the eighties have disturbed feminists in the way that all "histories of the present" are bound to do, developments in the nineties are disorienting us even further. Just how deep the unexamined claims of a modern secular democracy could go has been brought home in no uncertain terms by a series of "events" whose violence none were prepared for—riots, even self-immolations, by elite students protesting against reservation quotas (affirmative action) in government jobs for backward castes; the demolition of a mosque at the "birthplace" of the mythological Hindu god Ram, followed by some of the worst communal pogroms against Muslims the nation has witnessed; and a "revolution from above" that is sweeping away an "outmoded" socialist state to usher India into the new global order of liberalization. Whatever the irreducibility of these processes—and they are as much irreducible as fundamentally co-implicated with one an-

other—the middle class is crucially negotiating and shaping them in each case. This class, moreover, is the nation now (and not just its representative), out to save it from "casteist" policies favoring those marked backward, countering the "appeasement" of its Muslim and minority populations, and bringing true sovereignty via the mechanisms of the capitalist market rather than through "inefficient" planning and a "welfarist" state.

As a result, the language of politics, of justice denied, has been redeployed to sanction the right to dominance, openly and unabashedly claiming the space of the postcolonial nation as middle class, upper-caste, Hindu, and less obviously male, yet still speaking in terms of secularism and democracy. Part of the disorientation for feminists, therefore, has surfaced in their being forced to interrogate their own identities, affiliations, and practices, those aspects of the "self" that could remain transparent and go unmarked. At the end of their extensive study of the Indian women's movement—the first of its kind—Nandita Gandhi and Nandita Shah flounder in their discussion of religion and communalism. Is religion not an oppressive patriarchal force, something to be blanked out of one's mind? they ask. "But there is no way we can escape it in everyday politics, electoral wrangling and indeed in the lives of women."^[63] Even greater uncertainty has been produced by the realization that the very forces of communalism, caste oppression, and the new economic order not only boast of visibly assertive women in their ranks but speak the language of feminism itself. How does one respond, ask Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana, when allegations of sexual harassment are used to justify attacks on Dalits by upper caste men? Or when population planners invoke women's empowerment in their campaigns to introduce highly risky injectable female contraceptives and hormonal implants into India?^[64] As a consequence of these and similar developments, the boundaries marking feminism and feminist community, "selves" and "others," even politics itself, are all in the process of being redrawn.

It is too soon to expect anything like an extensive treatment of these issues. Let me cite one example that once again bears some of the qualities of an ethnography and that enacts the dilemmas being named here. In response to the contemporary communal tide, Tanika Sarkar, a feminist historian, set out in 1991 to interview

members of the Rashtrasevika Samiti in New Delhi, the less well-known women's wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a seasoned cadre-based organization of the Hindu Right. According to her, extremely recent developments among these women are bringing about something unprecedented: the older, more familiar symbol of inspiring motherhood is ceding ground to a new figure of vibrant militancy with "a trained, hardened, invincible female body," a mind of her own, and a sense of exhilarating possibility. Even the larger context of communalism has seen women on the center stage of riot scenes, as dynamic leaders in their own right, or courting arrest by the thousands in the cause of liberating Ram's birthplace at Ayodhya.^[65] Haunting Sarkar's entire discussion is a single question: Could it be that this new communal phase is more enabling than the leftist women's movement?

Listening to the women from the Samiti talk about how their organization's greatest value lies in the exposure it has brought to a world beyond the home, witnessing the strong sense of solidarity and supportiveness among members, Sarkar feels forced to examine just what sort of feminism is involved here, if feminism it is. She weaves back and forth between her own position as a feminist on the Left and the complex forms of self-empowerment these women are enacting. Radical women's organizations are "vertical" in structure, she tells us, "reaching out to less privileged sisters as soon as they form themselves,"^[66] especially in rural and laboring areas, in contrast to the "horizontal" modes of mobilization of women into the Rashtrasevika Samiti. Thus, the breadth of the older "split subject" is held up against this new class subject, whose actual membership is relatively very small, even if they have the advantage of strong cohesion within a homogeneous social milieu.

Most explicit within the Samiti is the theme of becoming empowered and militant in order to fight the enemy—Muslim lust. Sarkar, however, also discovers something less open to view—self-protection from the enemy within, from a potentially hostile Hindu environment. One version of the origin of the organization—not the official one, of course—has it that its founder witnessed a young girl being raped by (Hindu) hoodlums in the presence of her helpless husband.

Moreover, Sarkar realizes that these women come mainly from

upwardly mobile trading and service sectors of the middle class, precisely the ones with which feminist organizations in the seventies and eighties have had prior experience around family violence, divorce suits, and dowry deaths. In employment these women are bound to encounter further harassment and discrimination. Vociferously against a "traditional" practice such as sati, they even evaluate the women's movement in positive terms in spite of "official" denunciations of its corrupting western influence.

Doesn't all this, then, clearly add up to a feminist consciousness? No doubt, says Sarkar, but of a "bourgeois" kind: "The new Hindu woman is . . . a person with professional and economic opportunities, secure property ownership, legal rights to ensure them and some amount of political power to enforce these rights."^[67] More critical now, Sarkar shows how these new citizens in fact blunt the edge of feminism by adopting a "neutral" position on issues: home life is to be preserved and not broken; intercaste and intercommunity marriages are permitted, but only if the family agrees. Caste is denounced by the dropping of last names and promotion of community dining but never discussed. Class is an area of silence.

According to Tharu and Niranjana, it is this "neutrality effect"^[68] that feeds into and in turn is upheld by the nationalism of the Hindu Right, a nationalism indeed less fundamentalist than bourgeois. They emphasize just how hegemonic the new Hindu woman may become, rapidly entering a new middle class "common sense." If Sarkar loses her sense of disturbance and by the end of the essay has placed all confidence on "the more aware and sensitive forms of Left democratic and feminist movements"^[69] to counter communal hatred and genuinely address caste, class, and gender oppressions, Tharu and Niranjana insist on the prior need to excavate the alliance between the new Right and the subject of liberal humanism. For the question is whether "our" claims to secularism and democracy have not also been undergirded by this very subject.

If we just step back for a moment and contrast the sense of feminist community that emerges here with the kind of examples I took up earlier, the difference is overwhelming. The fact that both the self and the other, the knower and the known, are feminist has become a source of disturbance and distanciation, if not disiden-

tification. Under the previous dominance of the imagined economy, when the socialist claims of the Indian nation were being actively interrogated, "privileged" feminists were reaching out to and identifying with their more distant sisters in the name of social, economic, and gender justice for "all" women. Today, as a reconfigured hegemonic culture occupies center stage, with feminism having become a part of this culture, feminists are forced to scrutinize their immediate worlds in a new way. It has become painfully clear to some, at least, that the assumption of a secular India was just that, an assumption.

Thus, when Lila Abu-Lughod writes about how notions of the "self" and the "other" are far more complex than much of anthropology, including experimental anthropology, would allow, she is absolutely right. Just consider the way in which the dominant subject in India was formed under the aegis of colonialism and with the coming of national independence:

The shaping of the normative human-Indian subject involved, on the one hand, a dialectical relationship of inequality and opposition with the classical subject of western liberalism, and, on the other hand, its coding as upper-caste, middle class, Hindu and male. The coding was effected by processes of othering/differentiation such as, for example, the definition of upper-caste/class female respectability in counterpoint to lower-caste licentiousness, or Hindu tolerance to Muslim fanaticism and by a gradual and sustained transformation of the institutions that govern everyday life. Elaborated and consolidated through a series of conflicts, this coding became invisible as this citizen-self was redesignated as modern, secular and democratic.^[70]

At the same time, let us not forget the incredibly disabling and immobilizing forms of othering that continue to be produced in the late twentieth century, when even third world nations like India are busy celebrating the possibilities of the agentive "new woman." Within the ambit of the hegemonic constructions of Hindu nationalism I have just been discussing, there is no room, for instance, for the Muslim woman. Indeed, as Tharu and Niranjana point out, "[t]he Muslim woman is caught in a terrible zero-zero game. She cannot really be woman any more than she can be Indian. As woman and as Indian, she cannot really be Muslim."^[71]

The fact that right-wing women publicly proclaim Muslim men to be the main enemy can produce the worst of antagonisms between Hindu and Muslim women. Newly reconstituted contradictions and patterns of exclusion along class and caste lines are also actively setting upper caste and middle class women against those who are lower caste and poor. What unites the often very different forms of othering at work here—and, most important, what makes them unprecedented in postindependence India—is that these processes are openly legitimized by the newly articulate middle class and, indeed, may not even appear as problems at all.

How might feminists on the Left, more accustomed to political initiatives and forms of scholarship that leave essential aspects of their own identities out of the frame, situate themselves today? Angie Chabram's project around a proposed "oppositional ethnography" by Chicana/os in the U.S. academy comes to mind here. What would such a project look like in the Indian feminist context? Chabram focuses on the invisibility of marginalized people of color, but a different kind of invisibility is at issue among feminist activists and academics in India—the extent of "our" Hindu, middle class, and upper caste presence. Beyond just "naming" that which could hitherto pass unmarked in the feminist community, such an ethnography might be able to elaborate the contemporary meanings and practices that are attached to these markers. Under the sign of a specifically Indian modernity, in which vicinities and spaces of our everyday lives have they been suppressed? Where have they lived on? And what of feminists whose identities diverge from this norm?

The contemporary feminist field is far more complex than these loosely formulated questions would suggest. Conflicting forces, whose charge and direction are as yet poorly understood, are bringing new constellations of the West, of gender and the nation, into view. The present has not grown any less obtuse, and the Indian women's movement itself is entering its most challenging phase yet. These preliminary explorations have nonetheless made it possible to put forward two related arguments that I believe to be relevant not only for the United States but also for India: first, locations fundamentally structure our work and our politics in ways that tend to remain obscured; second, it is the failure to theorize the nation

that has contributed most to the poor appreciation of our locational partialities.

One way of plotting the difference in the intellectual fields of the two nation-spaces—the way chosen in this chapter—is to see how ethnography plays in each context. To repeat a point made earlier, no ferment motivates the discipline of anthropology (or, for that matter, sociology) in India, at least not yet. The "ethnographies" I foregrounded by way of illustration were produced by feminists from economics, history, and English literature departments or by feminists located outside the academy. This certainly doesn't prevent aspects of Western debates from being relevant here, whether they are specifically attached to feminist ethnography or arise out of the broader tensions and conflicts characteristic of U.S. theory and feminism discussed in chapters two and three. It is vital, though, to appreciate just why.

The potential relevance of such debates has much more to do with the palpable and disruptive political developments overtaking Indian feminist praxis than with a desire to go "experimental" or be up on "theory." Indian feminists committed to egalitarian principles in the face of an ethos ready to condone inequalities are being forced into greater self-reflexivity about their aims, their methods of critique, and their alliance politics. We are now in the process of articulating a new—less transparent and more modest—politics of representation in our claims to speak from the perspective of India's "other" women.

More composite forms of theorizing the Indian feminist context demand an examination of our extraordinarily disparate conceptual apparatus and the divergent careers of gender, sexuality,^[72] class, caste, community, and region. We are only beginning to sense the chasm that separates our relative facility with respect to some of these terms over against the repression, opacity, and sanctioned ignorance governing others. Can the insights of "theory" and the debates of Western feminism be useful in this process? No question.^[73] At the very least, the unequal positions of the concepts structuring U.S. feminist theory can alert us to some of the difficulties involved. On a more positive note, I would like to think that some of the impasses and conflicts, especially around the question

of race and the demands of U.S. women of color, could be illuminating analogies that would travel well, if handled with care, into our contemporary situation.

I am unable to say more (yet) in this regard. In a paradoxical sense, for Western debates to travel better into third-world spaces, the axis of the West—its position as obvious and ultimate source of reference—would first have to be displaced or, at any rate, redirected. This book—not excluding the present chapter—has been too deeply formed in the Western light, or under its shadow, to be able to initiate the next steps.

It is time to conceive of travel differently—between third-world nations, for instance, or between third-world spaces in the West. Unlike Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen, who only seem to view travel negatively, I would, therefore, like to suggest that we conceive of it afresh—in both the third world and in the first.^[74] Precisely when the hegemony of the United States over the rest of the globe appears more "natural" than ever, it could be important for U.S. feminists to travel in search of perspectives that might otherwise elude them as citizens of the world's only superpower. More to the point, Western feminists need to reconsider what they are out to learn from the distant places they visit. Instead of developing ever more theoretically sophisticated twists on the cross-cultural construction of gender,^[75] why not attend also to feminist voices from elsewhere? How are women's issues situated? Who represents them? What institutions advance their cause? What impasses beset them?

Questions such as these might point to a more viable—and accountable—international feminism than claims either to our universal oppression or to its obverse, our global sisterhood, have hitherto allowed.