Religion, Communal Identities and the Women’s Movement

 

Raashida Gull

 

ABSTRACT:

A vigorous although uneven women’s movement has taken shape in India after independence. Women from diverse castes, classes and communities have participated in the movement making it highly heterogeneous. But emphasizing women’s common oppression as a fundamental basis for unity in the women’s movement does not address reality. Feminism is not about gender alone, but about understanding how gender is complicated by religion and other identities. The differences emerging out of race, caste, religion and so on cannot be underestimated and based on these differences there has been a resurgence of identities. The new challenges that the women’s movement is facing are emerging out of these vast diversities within India. The question of the entanglement of ‘gender’ with religious identities is giving rise to numerous debates within the Indian women’s movement revolving round the questions of Uniform Civil Code and Personal laws and these religious identities are posing a challenge to the movement. It is in this context the present paper attempts to analyze such debates and how such religious identities are acting as a challenge to the mainstream feminist movement.

 

KEY WORDS:

 

INTRODUCTION:

There has always been a troubled relationship between the women’s movement and religion. The early women’s movement of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in India engaged positively with religious discourses in order to promote women’s rights. While the autonomous women’s movement after independence based on the principle of secularism, largely avoided questions related to religion, sometimes even criticizing religious practices altogether, there have been attempts on the part of some sections of the movement to positively engage with religious discourses and symbols (like the naming of the first feminist publishing house as ‘Kali for Women’) . Such attempts can be seen as step towards diluting the western bias of feminism and indigenize feminism. But for the most part, the relationship between contemporary women’s movement and religion has been marked by indifference and hostility, with the women’s movement often witnessing backlash from religious groups. Against the background of growing communal hostilities, the notion of unity among women within the women’s movement is witnessing a change where the movement has to deal with gender as well as religious identities of women. India being a multicultural state, conflict is bound to arise between the pursuit of gender equality and the protection of minority rights, most of the times subordinating gender justice to religious claims of minority groups. With reform within personal laws position to demand for a Uniform Civil code, feminists are coming up with various strategies to deal with the issue of multireligious identities of women.

 

 

It is in this background that the present review paper is attempting to capture the diversity of debates surrounding the question of entanglement of gender with the religious identity of women.

 

Religious identities and feminist dilemmas:

While the feminists had attempted to distinguish between women on the basis of caste and class, and later region and culture, counter movements against feminism are imposing communal distinctions where Indians are being distinguished from each other as being Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and so on. Thus, the category ‘Indian women’ itself is broken down into several constituents of which the most important becomes communal identity. The attempts to better the conditions of women of any community are treated as attempts to impose alien norms and considered as interference with communal autonomy. Communal offensives are being launched against laws which had existed over a century, under the somewhat arbitrary banner of ‘religion in danger’. Muslims being a minority in India are keen to preserve their cultural identity allowing least inference in the sphere of Muslim Personal Law. Moreover, as with Dalit feminism, minority women too have expressed their fears claiming that they have felt isolated and alienated within the movement because of the predominantly Hindu symbols being used within the movement, therefore, Hindu and Indian becoming synonymous. Although the women’s movement has largely avoided questions relating to religion, but some sections of the movement have made attempts to positively engage with religious discourses and symbols (but the focus has been almost exclusively on Hindu religious imagery). For example, Ritu Menon and Urvashi Batulia chose the name Kali for a feminist publishing house they set up in Delhi. Because of such use of Hindu imagery, minority women suggest that mainstream feminism is upper caste, Hindu in its orientation, hence unable to address the issues of them. This has resulted in the formation of organizations like Awaaz-e-Niswaan formed in 1987 in a predominantly muslim dominated area in Mumbai. Indian feminism is continuously witnessing challenges from these quarters of caste, communalism, etc. There has been a shift from the feminist demand of gender just civil code to looking for alternative solutions including internal community reforms due to a cooption of feminist arguments by rightwing forces. The issue of personal law became especially controversial for feminists in 1985, with what is now referred to as ‘the Shah Bano Case*’. The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 passed as result of this case was a major compromise on the part of the government on women’s issues. Debates surrounding the Shah Bano case highlight the extent to which gender equality may be compromised by yielding to the dominant voices within a particular religion community (Mullally 2004)[i]. Moreover in the name of preserving the heritage and culture of the country by discarding western influence, there has been the emergence of some kind of inverted feminism based on orthodox rightist philosophy. Since the decade of the 1990s the growth of this kind of militant feminism based on religious fundamentalist line has caused a lot of tension for the women of the country in general and feminists in particular. There has been the emergence of the Hindutvabadi militant women. The Durga Vahini of Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Rashtrasevika Samity of RSS and Mohila Aghadi of Shiv Sena played the leading role towards the growth of Hindutvabadi militant women and towards the degeneration of feminist ideals and the concept of women’s emancipation. They have appropriated the women’s cause without sharing the ideology of feminism. They would grant a special status to woman as long as she functions within the limits of patriarchy (Sathe 1996)[ii]. Tremendous level of development has been witnessed in such a trend since the days of Bombay and Surat riots of 1992-93 to the Gujarat carnage of 2002. There has been a marked visibility of women who are defending the actions of their men folk like rioting, murder and even raping the women of different community. Such women sometimes go for the direct attacking of people from the minority communities on different occasions. Militant women like Sadhvi Rithambara and Uma Bharati summon feminine symbolism for promoting aggressive Hindu fundamentalism and nationalism, being detrimental to women’s cause (Sugirtharajah 2002)[iii]. Ghosal is of the view that this new communal phase has an extremely detrimental effect on the overall context of Indian feminist movement. She considers it as an attempt on the part of the patriarchal culture to develop newer techniques of domination (Ghosal 2005)[iv]. Thus, the women’s movement has to devise newer strategies to deal with the challenge emanating from the religious sphere.

 

 

Personal laws and the women’s movement:

The feminists’ engagement with religion was largely through the sphere of personal laws. The family and home have always been considered by the feminists as the single most important structures ordering women’s lives. By the early eighties, attempts to look into the relationship of women to and within the family had led to examining the codification of women’s rights regarding property, maintenance, marriage, divorce etc. In India as this codification of rights into law is determined by religion as well as community, this entailed investigation on the part of feminists into different personal laws. The term ‘personal’ when conjoined with law means the different family laws of different religious communities. The personal areas of marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship etc are being governed by personal laws for different religious communities. This has been conceptualized as a remnant of colonial jurisprudence where a policy of non-interference with ‘personal customs’ was pursued by the Britishers. The Britishers adopted a policy of letting Hindus be governed by Hindu Law and Muslims by Muslim law in matters of family relations. Such a policy in the field of family law by the Britishers had a crippling effect on women. Such a policy led to codification of personal laws of different religious communities (Muslim, Hindu, Christian, etc) in consultation with the representatives of these communities and such a trend continues in independent India. Because of the British policy, the modernization of most of these laws is proving difficult even in present times. These personal laws are considered as markers of identity for different religious communities more so in the case of the Muslim community.

 

The process of initiating legal measures for women was started with the efforts of our social reformers in the early part of the 19^th century because of whom some marginal adjustments were made. But the policy of non-interference in family law by the British resulted in diversification (due to customs) in major personal laws of different religious communities in different parts of the country and various interpretations of the sacred texts. The process of codification of Muslim personal law was initiated in 1930s when the Shariat Act, 1937 and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939 were passed which partially remedied this diversification and brought all the Muslims under the Act. These laws, replacing governance by customary laws, were considered progressive giving Muslim women rights denied to them under ‘customary law’. Among Hindus this lack of uniformity also posed a serious problem. It was only on Gandhiji’s insistence that women must suffer no discrimination that the step towards the codification of Hindu law was taken under the chairmanship of Sir B. N. Rao but the resistance was so great that no progress could be made. It was only after independence that such steps could be taken and laws passed but in a piecemeal fashion owing to the resistance from those who believed in status quo. After independence, the focus being on reform of Hindu personal law, laws such as the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956; the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956 etc were passed. These laws, according to Geetanjali Gangoli, do not create feminist legal system for Hindu women and often offer limited rights to women (Gangoli 2007)[v].  Different religious communities continue to resist the intervention of the Indian state into the private sphere of family, marriage and gender relations. The attempts at modernization of the Hindu family were resisted during the colonial era as is being witnessed in the contemporary Indian state where the right of the state to intervene in the private is being debated.  The same body, while acting as the constituent assembly, adopted the equal rights clauses in the constitution, while functioning in its capacity as the central legislature, blocked the Hindu Code Bill which attempted to provide only partial equality to women. The Christian women’s demand for a reform in their outdated, discriminatory and sexist personal laws was also not conceded. In case of MPL this opposition was witnessed in the 1960s when a move to amend MPL had to be dropped because of conveyance of resentment by vice president of India, Zakir Hussain, on behalf of entire Muslim community. The advocacy of Muslim women’s rights is the area in which the relationship between religion and gender has been the most contentious in the Indian context. This can be seen with respect to Shah Bano case during the 1980s when the women’s movement had to rethink its strategy vis-à-vis religion. The Muslim women’s bill was introduced in the wake of national movements by different interest groups following the controversial ‘Shah Bano’ judgement. The outcome of this case was focus on community rights by Lok Sabha allowing the minority communities to self regulate their personal laws, but this case marked a pivotal moment in the discussion of rights of women from religious minorities and their relationship with the Indian state. However this outcome based on patriarchal interests works to the detriment of Indian Muslim women who as equal citizens are entitled to equal protection under the law. This case also provides an example of intersectionality where multiple identities cut across each other to work for the advantage or disadvantage of particular groups and individuals in society. The case of Shah Bano involved the intersectionality of gender and religion where state supported her rights but the pressure of Muslim community forced her to reject her rights. However, Gangoli does not consider the Muslim women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act**,

** The Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act states that Muslim women shall not fall under the civil code in cases of divorce. The maintenance for divorced Muslim women is not the responsibility of the husband but rather falls on her natal family or the local Waqf Board.

 

 

1986, passed in wake of Shah bano case, completely discriminatory as it does benefit Muslim women when interpreted liberally and it is discriminatory in the sense that it denies a section of women access to secular law on the grounds of their religion (Ibid 2007)[vi]. The controversy regarding religion and the rights of Muslim women aroused by Shah Bano case resulted in no reforms being made to the Muslim personal law upto this date. But there have been efforts towards reforming laws of other religious communities like Christian and Hindu personal law since Shah Bano controversy. Christian representatives and women’s rights advocates have lobbied for changes in Christian personal laws since the 1990s and have been successful in gaining reforms in laws related to divorce. Hindu personal laws too have been amended with the passage of the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, providing increased property rights for Hindu women. If in the mid-1980s the debates on maintenance and divorce were going on, in the 1990s the issues under debate were those of oral divorce under Muslim Law and polygamy. The components of talaq-e-biddat (triple talaq) and polygamy have been constructed as markers of negative muslim identity by Hindu Fundamentalists. The bias against MPL in legislative, legal and judicial discourses on the UCC becomes even more apparent from the absence of discussion about the areas of MPL that might be considered pro women, such as inheritance rights as recognized by the Status of Women Report in 1974. Under MPL Muslim women have rights to parental property and married women have rights over their husbands’ property and they cannot be disinherited through a will. Because of the failure to bring about reforms in Muslim personal law, Muslim women led groups (Awaz-e-Niswan) and networks have taken the responsibility to move the debate forward on the behalf of Muslim women. Nida Kirmani in her work “Beyond the Impasse: ‘Muslim Feminism(s) and the Indian Women’s Movement” (2011) traces the emergence of two such networks, the Muslim Women’s Rights Network (MWRN) and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) engaged in advocating Muslim women’s rights. Sylvia Vatuk considers the All-India Muslim Women’s Rights Network the most successful and longest surviving coalition having the most national reach (Vatuk 2008)[vii].

There has been a continuous debate going on surrounding personal laws and multiple of perceptions have been provided that range from internal reform to articulation of the debate primarily in terms of women’s rights to a perception of a comprehensive package of gender just laws with the option of choosing personal laws at any point (as provided by a Delhi based group, Working Group for Women’s Rights). Khan Noor Ephroz is of the view that male-dominated interpretations of the primary sources of Islamic matrimonial law have jeopardized the virtual status of women in Muslim society (Ephroz 2003)[viii]. There have also been feminists and activists within the Muslim community in India and elsewhere who have argued for feminist reinterpreting of the Quran suggesting that Islam offers unlimited scope for gender reform. Such view has informed the efforts of a Bombay based group made up of Muslim women, the Nikaahnama Group, which has created a model nikaahnama (Marriage contract) wherein many rights and safeguards are available to Muslim women like they can claim rights to matrimonial property, some safeguards for unilateral divorce and polygamy, right to an enhanced mehr in the case of unilateral divorce and so on. Although such model has its own positive aspects but it is limiting in certain ways like it has no provision for women who do not enter into marriage etc. Moreover, this model of nikaahnama by Muslim feminists was ignored by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board in 2005, thus, negating the efforts of Muslim feminists. There have also been criticisms of the ‘reform from within’ position. It is argued that it detracts from the inadequacies and discrimination that all women face and share in common. Women within minority situations like Muslim women work hard to balance their feminist politics with their religious identity and their attachment to religious identity does not necessarily preclude a feminist orientation.

 

Personal laws and the demand for a uniform civil code:

Feminist autonomous groups have been in the forefront of the campaign for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) for all Indians as different people are governed by their own religious personal laws which, in different ways, are discriminatory against women (Sen 2004)[ix]. Calls for a uniform Civil Code have, infact, been made in India since the 1930s by leaders of the freedom movement (Kirmani 2011)[x] and demand for a UCC was also made a part of the directive principles of the constitution. Although article 44 of the Indian constitution directs that the state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a Uniform Civil Code throughout the territory of India but such a direction has not been changed into reality till date. The demand of feminists for Uniform Civil Code to replace religion based and differentiated family laws was also turned down. The demand for the creation of UCC was also made by feminists in response to the Shah Bano case; the underlying assumption was that all women deserved the same rights regardless of their religious affiliation. However, this stance was given up by the feminists after its cooption by the Hindu right. For fear of Hindu communalism, the Muslims who lent their support for the change in their personal law change stance and become ardent supporters of it. In the 1930s, the period of rising communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims, when the All India Women’s Conference and other women’s organizations raised demands for a uniform civil code, Muslim women felt forced to choose to focus on demands for changes within their own personal law. Such communalization of debates is always surrounding the rhetoric of minority women rights as was recognized by Shahnaz Shaikh who accepted that appeals to the state communalized the debate. Such communalization can be witnessed in the Shah Bano case which was seen as a political opportunity by the Hindu Right to criticize the backwardness of Muslim community forgetting about the resistance shown by them to the Hindu Code Bill. The focus of feminists was on Shah Bano’s right to dignity as a citizen of India and not as a member of any particular religious community which was in line with the secular approach of the movement. But the groups of the Hindu Right and Muslim conservatives used Muslim women and personal law as the terrain to fight political battles over questions of group identity without least concern for women’s rights. The Muslim women have become a site for controversy on Uniform Civil Code between majoritarian nationalists who use the slogan of secularism in support of the homogenization of the family law and the Muslim fundamentalists who oppose any legal intervention on the ground that their personal law is not open to legal regulation. Therefore, in the feminist group (Awaaz-e-Niswaan) started by Shahnaz Shaikh in 1987, the UCC was rephrased as ‘women’s code’ as a way to avoid the religious framework that would paralyze discussion. What feminists could grasp from this was that there is no such thing as common category of women because they are differentiated by caste, class and community and therefore, any definition of rights has also to be based on these differentiations. The demand for UCC was also made by authors of the Status of Women Report. The demand for the creation of UCC was also raised by many members of the constituent assembly on the grounds that it would facilitate national integration, but there was also opposition to it on the grounds that it would jeopardize the cultural identity of minorities, especially Muslims. Thus, the debate around UCC gave rise to a debate around individual rights, citizenship and national integration on the one hand, and minority rights and cultural diversity on the other.  As is apparent the discourse around personal laws and UCC was conducted within the parameters of national integration and community rights and not those of women’s rights within the family (Gangoli 2007)[xi]. Dr. Sunit Gupta is of the view that the continuance of different personal laws having different provisions in relation to women’s rights leads to inequalities against women vis-a-viz men as well as women vis-a-viz women (Gupta )[xii]. S. P. Sathe is of the view that national integration is not going to be jeopardized if people continue to have multiple personal laws. But there is the need for critique of these personal laws from the perspective of substantive equality between man and women and also between women irrespective of their religion (Sathe 1996)[xiii]. Although the discourse of Uniform Civil Code is used by different groups for different personal interests, but for feminists it should be a means of engendering family laws.

 

CONCLUSION:

The debate around religion and women’s rights gave rise to certain serious debates within the women’s movement. Finding the differences in the backgrounds of its members in terms of caste, class and religion, serious questions were raised regarding representation of these different women in the women’s movement, calling into question the secular character of the movement. The debate on Muslim personal laws alongside the selective use of Hindu religious imagery led some critics of the women’s movement (Agnes, Sunder Rajan) to argue that the women’s movement had not developed a truly secular position. Moreover, the movement was criticized for its failure to explore alternatives for reconciling religious identity and gender-related concerns. Because of the different groups of women having different interests, there is no real basis on which they can work together. To set the platform from where women from different religious and cultural communities can work together, feminists have to resolve the apparent conflict between the politics of multiculturalism and the pursuit of gender equality.