It isn't even as if women are only 'benefi-ciaries'—albeit in ironic and grotesque forms—of the Hindu Right's agenda. This agenda is often represented and advanced by a highly visible gaggle of women—Mama Scindia, Uma Bharati and the foulmouthed Ritambhara. This volume is, therefore, particularly welcome. The editors are apologetic about the fact that the book has been "unforgivably long in the making", but construe some ironic yet legitimate consolation from the fact that the passage of years has not rendered their concerns irrelevant. For, though they are temporarily preoccupied with covering their derriere, the gentlefolk of the Hindu Right are still very much operative in our midst.
The book has 15 contributions—mainly essays, plus an introduction, a report from a women's delegation that visited Bhopal, Ahmedabad and Surat, and interviews with 'communal' women, that is, female Hindutva activists. The authors are drawnfrom a wide range of scholarly interests and, I suspect, feminist persuasion. Purushottam Agarwal, who weighs in with Surat, Savarkar and Draupadi: Legitimising Rape as a Political Weapon, plays Achilles among these women. The book seeks "to break new ground by posing questions about women's activism within the Hindu Right". In the days of our innocence, it had been assumed—against historical evidence, for example, from Hitler's Germany—that since the khaki-shorted gentlemen with their aura of homophilia spoke about 'tradition', they would be averse to mobilising women for the public political sphere. This might have been reinforced at some subconscious level by a sentimental-feminist assumption that women were 'naturally' soft and kind and therefore not amenableto the intrinsically violent politics of communalism. The evidence of the last few years is not pretty—but perhaps one mustn't grudge Sikata Banerjee, who examines the 'feminisation of violence in Bombay' under the aegis of the BJP and its electoral ally, the Shiv Sena, her loyal adjective—"surprising". Still, it must be part of the objective of such a book to ensure that we aren't "surprised" again. And again.
The essays also seek—and not a moment too soon, in this context too—to pose "dif-ficult but important questions for the theory and practice of feminist politics which has, by and large, tended to identify women's political activism with emancipa-tory politics" of a leftist kind. Any suchattempt to rethink the questions of gender within our own, painful and surprising historical specificities are greatly to be welcomed. The engines of western feminism are constantly turning out items of intellectual consumption—trendy, glossy designs which it appears perverse to turn down in favour of our modest homespun. But, and women must know this even if feminists don't, revolutions too must begin at home.
Many of the contributions to this thoughtful and timely volume address the question of why the Hindu Right, with its shockingly violent record, appeals to women. Tanika Sarkar writes: "In moments of mass violence the only women who have engaged our attention so far have been the victims.... Within religion, women are usually regarded as quietist devotees." The furies of the Hindu Right, however, enable the contributors to this volume to open up a discursive space between economic reductionism—business by other means, so to speak—and the intellectual tendency that sees in the emergence of the Hindu Right only "a hard form of nationalism, born outof Western modernity".
The appeal of the Hindu Right—BJP, VHP, Sena—is rather nicely, if ironically, captured by the title of Radha Kumar's study of women's movements,The History of Doing. The strength of the Hindu Right is that in its movements women are able to do something even as they are—cooking for the demolition squad, maybe. Women were encouraged to participate in 'history-making' without first having to understand all about patriarchy and gender oppression—that is, without first having to become someoneother than they are, on trust. Sikata Bane-rjee's piece, Hindu Nationalism and the Cons -truction of Woman, is explicit. "Feminists are attacking the fundamental expression: 'belonging to a family'." This is, of course, because the family is a patriarchal institution, and 'belonging' is merely a trap. Yet, any serious alternative politics—feminist, socialist, radical—will have to create another collective identity, one able to draw on available cultural languages to imbue itself with symbolic resonance and depth. Ban-erjee concludes: "Feminists in India have not been successful in forging such an identity yet." The failure embraces the whole secular project in the country—and if the question of women and the Hindu Right enables us to have fresh thoughts about tired old secularism, so much the better.
