By Anjali Shreshth
In the feminist literature, R.W. Connell defines masculinity as the “socially produced but embodied ways of being a male.” In essence, it seeks to enforce and construct a social order that legitimizes the dominant cultural expression of maleness. In a gendered world, everything is configured by a sexual division of labour. That is why it comes as no surprise to deduce politics as the prime site for sustaining this gendered relation of power. Masculinisation of politics has been a central aspect of the organisation of social life, especially from when man transcended from myths to logos to justify female subjugation, in the words of Simone de Beauvoir. In India’s colonial and post-colonial phase, a gendered schema of politics had explicitly emerged, that seeks to give an ontological vantage to the ‘male’ way of doing things. Were there interpellations caused by facets of modernity in its development? Yes, definitely. A postcolonial politics in the nation, laced with far right, populist sentiments have emerged to some extent in reaction to the modernist agenda of the leaders, immediately post-independence. Is this to suggest a clean slate for these leaders? No. However, for the purposes of this essay, we shall focus more on the monster of far-right politics, which seeks to practise a brand of muscular nationalism by distorting history and legacy, specifically these two legends, to strengthen its agenda.
Historically, the ontological vantage point that seeks to sustain male supremacy has been subsumed under one label of ‘patriarchy.’ However, the veracity of configurations and reconfigurations made by gender in politics can best be comprehended by using the analytical framework of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Hence, for the purposes of this essay, we shall use the same to dissect the masculinization of politics today.
First, this essay examines how muscular nationalism creates a deviant ‘Other’ in its schema of things to establish its own legitimacy and authority. This politics of othering seeks to other the Muslim religious minority in India. We trace the patterns of how othering is performed by the two epics and contemporary Indian politics today, situated in their specific contexts, but using the same logic. We accentuate this argument with a cautious portrayal of the framing of masculinity and femininity in the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Lastly, we trace how hegemonic femininities are employed in politics to maintain the hegemony of dominant masculinities, and consequently, oppressive muscular nationalism, as we know today.
Muscular nationalism and the construction of the ‘Other’ in contemporary Indian Politics
The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ was propounded by R.W. Connell is extremely useful in comprehending the distinctive patterns embellishing the construction of political masculinity in the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, on one hand, and the postcolonial Indian politics, on the other. This concept enables us to trace distinctive patterns between the same. In her study of hegemonic masculinity, Connell observed that it occupies a hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations. The given pattern of gender relations is a spatial and temporal construct discursively formed through mediations and conflicts between the modern and pre-modern. A central feature enabling the construction of this hegemonic masculinity is the process of ‘othering’. The designated body of the ‘Other’ is inscribed with deviant forms of masculinity and sexuality to mark it as inimical. In the post-colonial Indian Politics, we see how the right-wing Hindu nationalism, has constantly drawn tropes from the mythic realities of the Ramayana and Mahabharata to evoke a form of hegemonic ‘ideal’ masculinity of the Hindu male and a deviant masculinity of the ‘other.’ Expanding on the same, Sikata Bannerjee’s conceptual framework of Hindutva states that thoughts about the ideal manhood are not developed by strongly positioning the same against an ‘effeminate Other’. Rather, it is developed by positioning itself against the fear of the ‘hypermasculine Other’. This requires the ‘self’ to demand the recovery of a lost manhood in order to resist the erosion of Hindu political presence and domination. This in turn requires the construction of an aggressive, disciplined Hindu male who is able to adequately deal with the challenged posed by the religious ‘Other’. Catarina Kinnvall develops a similar concept of the ‘anxious nationalism’ to present how religious identity merges with images of nationalist resurgence to construct what Lacan calls the ‘fantasmatic’ fictional ‘Other.’ According to her, this fictional ‘Other’ is created by positing a sense of ontological insecurity as a source of ‘emasculation’. To ease this perceived insecurity, the fictional ‘Other’ is transformed into an existential threat.
In India, the fictional ‘Other’ is the Muslim religious minority of the country and the sense of ontological insecurity has stemmed from the imagined and exacerbated threat from the Muslim religious community in India and abroad. As Dibyesh Anand notes,
Hindutva plays a game of fear with many strands—Islam by its very nature is fundamental … the history of Muslim rule in India is nothing but a catalogue of crimes of violence, plunder, and rape of Hindus; Muslims are solely responsible for the partition of Akhanda Bharat (united India) and those Muslims who stayed back did so because they were not satisfied with a separate Pakistan but desired Islamization of the whole of India.
In the same regard, we see how the Muslim male is hypermasculanised by presenting him as an aggressive, sexually depraved, hypersexualised being, preying on innocent Hindu girls. The comparisons made by BJP’s party workers between Muslims and figures like Ravana and Duryodhana stand testimony to constant attempts of muscular nationalism to evoke the
collective thought of the people to facilitate the othering of the Muslim. For example, consider the following remark made by Haribhushan Thakur, a BJP MLA:
We need Hanuman ji so that our youth could be strong, the people of our country could be strong. Just like Ravana’s Lanka was burnt by Hanuman ji, the demon-like Ravanas, who are hovering over Bihar and the country, should also be burnt.
Ravana here refers to a Muslim male. The reason for the right-wing drawing on such a trope could be comprehended by tracing a historical account of hypermasculinization of the Other, vis a vis, the two epics.
In the Ramayana, Rama is constructed as the righteous man, the ideal king, and an ideal husband, among other characterizations, tasked with ensuring the victory of good over evil. Ravana, on the other hand, is the evil King of Lanka. A hypermasculine, hypersexual being who sexually desires the wife of another man is blessed with ten heads by Lord Shiva. Similarly, in the Mahabharat, Duryodhana is constructed as an evil, insecure prince of the Kuru clan, who adopts hypermasculine, cunning, hyper aggressive features and tries to molest the dignity of the wife of his cousins.
The construction of such binaries between the Self/Other (Good/ Evil) significantly draws from the spermatic economy of ascetic masculinity. This is interesting as Arpita Chakraborty notes how ascetic masculinity is quickly becoming the dominant articulation of masculinity in Indian Politics. This can be traced to the pre-independence phase of the kind of masculinity exemplified by Gandhi and Vivekananda. In the post-independence phase, especially in the articulations of the Hindu right, figures such as that of Golwalkar, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and most significantly, Narendra Modi has been presented as ‘desexualized’, ascetic leaders, committed solely to the cause’ of the Indian nation. Thus, Chakraborty delineates how in the 2014 election campaign, Modi was marketed as a ‘Brahmachari, lauha purush’ (iron man), “whose unceremonious discarding of marital life was seen as proof of his virile masculinity necessary to be a national leader. By desexualizing himself and distancing himself from the marital responsibilities, he was seen as able to masculinize and dedicate himself towards the entire society rather than merely his family.”
In this context, it is significant to understand how such a hyperbolic masculinity of the Hindu right seeks to contend the secular modernity of the Nehruvian era. This is constantly done by portraying him as an “effeminate leader” who indulged in minority pleasing. This character is widely appropriated to Congress by contending how the Congress left the Ram Mandir issue, the debacle of Kashmir, etc. unresolved.
Hence, in the post-colonial space, we see a grand mobilisation of the valour of mythical characters of the Ramayana and Mahabharata to reinforce the idea of the ‘ideal masculinity’. At the same time, we see the comparing of the Muslim ‘Other’ (as constructed in the imagination of the caste Hindu male) to hypermasculine, aggressive figures of the Ravana, Duryodhana, etc. This argument could be further clarified at looking at the forms of masculinity and femininities constructed through the Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Masculinity and femininities constructed through the Ramayana and Mahabharata
Seminal works of authors such as A.K. Ramanujan have given us a rich, empirically informed literature on the presence of multivalent versions of the Ramayana, with variations embedded in the spatio-temporal constructs of the epoch. Pioneering work done by historians such V.S. Sukhtantar, whose compilation of the 100,000 verses of the Mahabharata, considered one of the most authoritative of all compilations, bring into light the various versions of the texts, across time and space. For the purpose of this essay, I shall ground my understanding of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, to the version prevalent in the folklore of the much of the Hindi speaking North India. As stated above, the masculinization of ancient Indian state-building was steeped in Brahmanical patriarchy. The form and substance of the hegemonic masculinity of the past, as propagated by the Hindu far-right today, epitomizes the warrior like masculinity of the Kshatriya. The framework of hegemonic masculinity in the Ramayana, centres around the masculinity exhibited by the ideal Kshatriya castes, the social space from which most of the male characters are drawn. According to Simon Brodbeck, both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata portray multiple male characters, and thus offer a rich material for a detailed study of masculinities. Could the central purpose of the Ramayana itself be to construct the ideal masculinity of the ‘perfect man’? Perhaps, Valmiki’s preamble to his version of the epic would offer us a great insight into the question.
In his preamble, Valmiki enquires from a nameless divine sage:
Is there a man in the world today who is truly virtuous? Who is there who is mighty and yet knows both what is right and how to act upon it? Who always speaks the truth and holds firmly to his vows? Who exemplifies proper conduct and is benevolent to all creatures? Who is learned, capable, and a pleasure to behold? Who is self-controlled, having subdued his anger? Who is both judicious and free from envy? Who, when his fury is aroused in battle, is feared even by the gods? This is what I want to hear, for my desire to know is very strong. Great seer, you must know of such a man. (Ramayana 1.1.2–5, tr. Goldman 1984: 121)
The prose above, veritably, narrates the quality imbued in Rama, the chief protagonist of the tale. But Rama was not an ordinary man. He was a King, a Statesman, tasked with upholding the ‘Dharma’ of the society. The Ramayana, in turn, seeks to construct the ideal masculinity of the perfect ruler, upholding the Kshatriya’s dharma of upholding the Varna based status quo of the State. The contextualisation of how these mechanisms were instituted are critical for us to understand how the postcolonial Indian politics, especially the Hindu far-right (since the Babri Masjid-Ram Temple debacle in Ayodhya) has sought to legitimize its politics through harking back to the ‘glorious myth’ of an Ideal State of a fabled Statesman. This, in turn, has allowed them to construct the masculinity of an ideal Statesman to rein in Indian politics, today.
The politics of the Ramyana, as in the tale of the Mahabharata seeks to reinforce, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s terminology, the ‘ideal Self’ by dominating over the Other. For Beauvoir, the male is constantly constructed and re-constructed as the “neutral axis”, as the embodiment of what a human being is, whereas the woman gets relegated as the ‘Other’, the signifier of everything deviant from the ideal construct. In both epics, the aim of the protagonist (Rama in the Ramayana and Arjun in the Mahabharata is to enforce “Dharma” (read as the ‘Beauvoirian Self’). This Dharma would seek to reinstate and reimpose the Brahmanical and Kshatriya’s patriarchy on the society. What gets constructed as the ‘Other’ and in the caricatures of iconoclasm of evil are the bodies and forms of those, who sought to transgress the status quo. Historical studies have portrayed how lower caste men and women were portrayed as demons and demonesses of the lore. A common trope of these constructions was, again the hyper sexualisation and hyper masculinity of these men and women. Hence, Surpnakaha, the sister to Ravana is portrayed as sexually desiring the married Rama, despite his assertions of commitment to his one wife. In the Mahabharata, again, we see Karna as the exemplifier of the Shudra varna. Karna’s transgressive status and his competing masculinity is schooled by the existing social order by associating him with the Kauravas, hence implicit in carrying out great evil. There is hardly any substantial questioning or justifications for his action grounded in the inferior treatment meted out by the righteous Pandavas to an able Karna.
This epistemic violence against the ‘Other’ is justified, even if the ‘righteous’ Self needs to use immoral means to bring out the larger victory of good over evil. Hence, it was just for Krishna to trick Karna into offering his ‘kavach’ to Krishna, disguised as a Brahmin, hence rendering him vulnerable to Arjun’s attack. In our collective imagination, these episodes are hardly questioned.
At this juncture, it is pertinent to bring out another conjecture. Hegemonic masculinity of the Hindu male is substantiated by the hegemonic femininity of the Hindu woman. The last section of this essay focuses on bringing out the same.
Tracing Hegemonic Femininities in contemporary religious nationalism in India
Masculinity and femininities are complementary to each other. Masculinity cannot exist without an adjacent femininity, which is crafted in a certain way to facilitate its own existence and hegemony. This is to say, there cannot exist the hegemonic masculinity of Rama, without the hegemonic femininity of Sita. In the context of the muscular nationalism of Hindutva today, iconoclasm is not merely drawn from the figures of Rama and Arjun. The collective memory of the upper-caste Hindu steadily draws forth references from its mythic imaginations of an ideal ‘upper caste Hindu woman’, epitomized in the figure of Sita and Draupadi.
In her ethnographic study of Hindutva women in Bhopal, Anshu Saluja states that the role of such women are mainly to sustain the communal propaganda though building strong interpersonal contacts and conduct Hindu ritual ceremonies while policing intercommunity marriages. Most of these activities are delegated not through official channels, but through the domestic sphere to other women. Tanika Sarkar further notes that they also work to “ensure that the entire mechanism of temples, domestic ritual events, pilgrimage sites and priests is efficiently fuelled through a constant rota of scheduled activities.” This is reminiscent of the historic positioning of an ideal woman who is strictly situated in the spiritual sphere of life, such as that of Sita in the Ramayana, restricted to domestic activities, spearheading the organisation of spiritual activities, such as festivals, ceremonies, etc. Hindutva women draw upon the propagandistic love-jihad between hapless Hindu woman and belligerent, sexually depraved Muslim man (hapless Sita-hypermasculanised, hypersexualized Ravana) trope to sustain the sense of ontological insecurity of the Hindu male. The femininity of the Muslim woman is similarly placed as complementing that of the hypermasculine, aggressive Muslim male, who seek to outnumber the Hindu population by having more children. As these women condone violence to further the Hindutva cause, we see a systematic inculcation of the violent emotions such as anger and defiance. But this anger has be to directed towards the “Other” and never against the social establishment under which they have been conditioned. Tracing back to the Mahabharata, we see a historical precedent in Draupadi. The blame for the disrobing of her body was conveniently put solely on the Kauravas and the others present in the court of Dhristrashtra. Draupadi took a ceremonious oath not to tie her hair until she washes it with Dushasana’s blood. There is no active condemnation of Yudhistir, who waged Draupadi as a mere object, even though he had lost himself. We see that female rage is directed, in response to both a real and imagined injustice, towards the Other, with no questioning of the social structures that they consider fundamental to their own wellbeing.
Conclusion
In the above examples, we can comprehend that the brand of muscular nationalism practised today (especially, since the Bhartiya Janta Party assumed electoral power from 2014) derives its strength and legitimacy from the muscular politics portrayed in the two epics. The object of othering might have varied based on spatial and temporal contexts, but the logic remains the same.
It is interesting to note that useful insights can be gathered by examining how muscular nationalism interacts with the neoliberal consumerism in India, in an atmosphere where colonialism and intellectual and material superiority of the ancient Indian over western modernity is a constant trope. These avenues may offer unique insights into the nature of muscular politics today and can be looked up as future scope of research within the domain.
Bio:
Anjali Shreshth is a recent graduate of Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women. She will be pursuing LLB Hons. at National Law School, Bangalore. Her research interests include gender and caste studies.
***
Like Cafe Dissensus on Facebook. Follow Cafe Dissensus on Twitter.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday is the blog of Cafe Dissensus magazine, born in New York City and currently based in India. All materials on the site are protected under Creative Commons License.
***
Read the latest issue of Cafe Dissensus Magazine, “The Other Mothers: Imagining Motherhood Differently”, edited by Paromita Sengupta, Director of Studies in Griffith College Limerick, Ireland.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 