GENDER & SOCIETY Gender, Religion & Nation

The idea of ‘nation’ is a construction- to create a semblance of unity, identity.

One way of creating this sense of belonging and national identity has been through the use of the nation as
mother imagery- it is evocative, it gives the sense of belonging and community.
Gendered meanings of these symbols
Charu gupta reading- not just the maps, but also mother cow, hindi- used as symbols to construct nationalistic
fervor and identity. Belonging and community
What are the different versions of this imagery? How has this changed over time? What sense does it give to us
about who belongs to the nation? (Caste-class location, can a muslim be a mother india? can a dalit? Can a
transwoman?)
What about women from Manipur, mothers from Kashmir?
Why would women/activists refuse this imagery?
What are the consequences of this kind of gendering of the nation?-What violence is invoked in the name of
who belongs and who doesn’t?
How are gendered narratives central to the construction of the nation and
nationality?

Why is the figure of the ‘mother’ so often invoked with regard to the nation?
Bharat Mata. Chromolithograph of
Abanindranath Tagore’s watercolor Bharat Mata
(dated to 1904–1905), published by the Indian
Press, Allahabad, circa 1910. (OSIAN’s Archive,
Research and Documentation Centre, Mumbai)
 Via Vhp.org

Picture postcard printed

by Karnatak Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, circa 1990. (Courtesy of Vijaya
Nagarajan, Berkeley, Calif.)
 Cover of the Hindi
Frontispiece to the Tamil
book Ma ka Aahvaan (The mother
schoolbook Putiya Aarampakkalvit
summons) by Dinanath Batra.
Tamil (Moonram Puttakam) (New
Published by Suruchi Prakashan,
elementary Tamil: Book three) by
New Delhi, 1996. (Courtesy of
V. Lakshmanan. Shri Shanmugha
Christiane Brosius, Heidelberg)
Publishing House, Mannargudi, 1958.
Untitled Sardar Sobha Singh,
[Bharat Mata]. Published Bharat Mata. Print by Mehta Art
by Coronation Litho, Press, New Delhi, circa 1950.
Shimla, acquired in 1983. (Courtesy of Erwin Neumayer and
(Courtesy of J. P. S. and Christine Schelberger, Vienna)
Patricia Uberoi, Delhi)
Brij Lal, March to Independence: Raahe Aazaadi. Printed by Sudarshan Studio, Lahore, circa 1947.
(Courtesy of Urvashi Butalia, New Delhi)
Gandhi said:
In this temple there are no statues of gods and goddesses. Here there is
only a map of India raised on marble. I hope that this temple will take
the form of a worldwide platform for all religions, along with Harijans,
and of all castes and beliefs, and it would contribute to feelings of
religious unity, peace and love in this country.16
The temple was an attempt at creating a composite religious and
national identity and was seen as a place where all – Hindus and
Muslims, high caste and low caste Hindus – could technically
come and worship. An intercaste dining feast was organised,
after giving doms and chamars ‘sunlight’ soap to ‘cleanse’
themselves in the nearby well and enter the temple.
Yet there was an overwhelming use of upper caste Hindu
symbols. The news- paper Aaj took out a special edition on
Bharat Mata on the occasion, and pub- lished poems eulogising
a combination of nationalist and Hindu image.19 Another poem
written in praise of the temple stated that after bathing in the
Ganges and after a visit to Vishwanath temple, a glimpse of the
mother made the day complete for a person.20 The temple had
the hymn ‘Vande Mataram’ inscribed at its gate. During its
inauguration, there was a ‘havan’, with offerings and recitations
from all the four Vedas by eight orthodox brahmin specialists.21
Unlike Bengal, in the Bharat Mata temple, the female figure
representing Mother India was absent, and instead concretised
into a political and geographical body of a map. The map
identified Hindu nationalism with the land of India. At the same
time, the map was imagined as ‘mother’, as a gendered entity in
a temple, inventing a tradition, and linking it to a poetics of love
and longing.
Mother as map as nation also served to define a loyal political
citizenry, devoted in the service of the nation. The children of
the nation attained an existence, personhood and identity in the
metaphor of boundary. These dutiful children were largely
articulated as the male Hindu sons of the nation, who were
promoted as constituting an ideal Indian. In fact, the
conceptualisation of the ‘Indian’ was one of the major currents
in Indian nationalist thought by the turn of the 20th century, and
the ideological preoccupation of the Bharat Mata temple gave
him a concrete presence. One wonders if it was inadver- tance
that Shivprasad Gupt in his article called it ‘Shri Bharatmata
Mandir’, which literally translated would mean ‘Mr Mother
India T emple’ , giving the mother a male prefix, and enclosing
her as a male entity
can the nation, any nation really ever belong to women? What is this nation built and held
together (intergated?) by the rape and torture of women? Does the control, surveillance
and violence on women’s lives, bodies and desires underlie the very core of what comes
to constitute nationalism and the nation? Are masculine and patriarchal notions inherent
to the imagination and construction of the nation? We have heard a lot about the
contradiction that plays out when the sanghi brigade relentless threaten ‘mothers’ and
‘sisters’ with sexual abuse alongside exhaltations to ‘Bharat Mata‘. However, a more
crucial question that we need ask is: Why is India a mother, why is Bharat a Mata, why?
Why this engendering of the nation? Does the imagery of the nation entrap women into
pinjras where we are reduced to biological reproducers of its members (‘sons’); limited to
‘mothers’/’wives’/’sisters’ in need of protection; contained into cultural signifiers who are
the markers and reproducers of cultural boundaries/differences; idolised into figures
whose bravery is realised through self-sacrifice/erasure? In this gendered construction of
the nation, the lives and experiences of Dalit, Adivasi and working class women are
invisibalised, frowned upon and even, criminalised. As we critique the nationalist project
of Hindutva, we need to interrogate if there can really be a truly inclusive nationalism or if
the nation functions on creating an excluded ‘other’ vs-a-vis whom difference is
established?
The violence of the nation on women does not lie only in
so-called ‘exceptional’ incidents, it is enacted in
the ‘everyday‘, in the ‘mundane’, most often in our most
initimate spaces and relations, in very insidious
ways, beginning from our families and continuing to
universities, workplaces and the society. The burden of
the nation is a daily reality for every woman, manifesting
in diverse forms inthe numerous regulations
and restrictions that bind and cage her, in the policing of
her autonomy and freedom that she has to negotiate and
resist, and even internalise, everyday. How many times
have our families told us that we have been corrupted by
‘Western’ ideals when we have argued with them for our
most basic rights, be it the right to venture out at night or
the right to study/work as a woman or the right to love
the one we desire (the list is endless)? 
This widespread image of the female body as the nation helps to This history goes some distance
explain why, during the waves of communal violence at the toward explaining the events in
time of independence, possession of women was such an Gujarat, with their insistent focus
important issue to the contending sides, as Muslims established on the violation of the female
Pakistan, and as Hindus and Muslims killed one another in large body. If the Muslim female body is
numbers during the mass migrations surrounding the separation a part of the nation that is currently
of the two nations. Women were raped in huge numbers; often dominated by one’s adversary, then
they were abducted as well and forced to bear the children of one must possess it to possess
the Muslim or Hindu who had abducted them.9 The rationale of secure control over the nation.
these rapes and abductions is easy to connect with the earlier Murder, and hence destruction of
history: if the female body symbolizes the nation, then in the the source of offspring, is one sure
struggle of two emerging nations the possession and way of depriving the adversary of
impregnation of women is a potent weapon in consolidating control over his “kingdom.” If in
power. Even when women were not abducted but were raped the process one dishonors the
and then brutally murdered, this too was an act symbolizing the adversary, all the better.
power of one group to damage the domain of rule of the other
group, dishonoring the group in the process.
Even when you are treated as a goddess and treated well- it can be deeply dehumanizing and
objectifying- Lajwant’s story

If woman symbolizes nation, why are women brutally and

sadistically tortured rather than abducted and impregnated? 

how the idea of woman as symbol of nation and national rule

could possibly lend itself to this particular type of violence,
what the connection can possibly be between seeing a woman
as a symbol of what one loves and honors and seeing her as an
object that one can break up, with indifference to her pain.
Shouldn’t we say that it’s only to the extent that men
had lost the connection between woman and nation that they
were able to treat women in this hideous way, not even
permitting the survival of the body itself, but first torturing it
and then, usually, burning it to cinders?
To bring these points back to the case of India: treating women
as the nation, while apparently honorific, is already a form of
objectification, and, particularly, of instrumentalization. Under
colonialism, a nation is a ground on which men may gratify
their desires for control and honor. By being exalted into a
symbol of nationhood, a woman is at the same time reduced—
from being a person who is an end, an autonomous subject,
someone whose feelings count, into being a mere ground for the
expression of male desire. Thus, although much of the time the
male who sees a woman that way will still want her to live and
eat and bear children, there is no principled barrier to his using
her brutally if that is what suits his desires. We see that
connection already in the grim tales of domestic violence
narrated by Sarkar.
involving the conception of women as means rather than ends,
that nation-worship can so easily segue into woman-killing.
Other forms of kingly rule—for example, most parents’
relations toward their very young children—do not involve
instrumentalization, and do not lead to violence of the sort we
see in Gujarat. But the particular way in which kingly rule over
women made them into a symbol of nationhood involved
instrumentalization. So the woman was reduced from a person
to a mere symbol, and that symbol, however apparently
honorific, was a mere tool of male ends. The road from that
point to violation is short and relatively direct.
Why equate the idea of India with that of the ‘mother’? Why is the face of nationalism almost always been a figure of female
on the map of India?

<pictures of Bharat Mata>

The idea of bharat mata gained popularity during the freedom movement triggering the nationalistic fervour among the masses
Usually the representation was of a sari clad woman wearing a crown with a cartographic representation of india in the
background. In the 1920s the images blended political overtones because they included pictures of Gandhi and other political
leaders.
Tricolour was also included
1936- Bharat Mata Temple
Maps are often an impersonal type of knowledge that tend to desocialize the territory they represent and foster the notion of a
socially empty space. Experts say maps or bodyscapes are quite the opposite as they pay very little regard to borders and
boundaries and even subversively undo or dissolve them. While modern day maps are necessary to gauge the boundaries of a
nation it is through a bodyscape that the sentiment of belonging and possession which is so crucial to the imagined community
of the nation is fostered.
Sumathi Ramaswamy- “It is because Mother India was constituted through the
course of the 20th century as a territorial deity presiding over the national space of
‘India’ that she has become such a popular fetish object in the present day Hindu
nationalist movement where her image proliferates in the postcards, stickers,
banners, posters and other visual paraphernalia.”
How do we construct the idea of a ‘nation’- nationalism a good
thing or bad thing? IT has an element of ugliness.
Is nationalism a way to instill a sense of service amongst our
people? to inspire a creative faculty. Nothing compulsory or
coercive. Generative or imaginative?
Nationalism can also however been an oppressive project
Nation as an aesthetic?