The Telegraph
Sabarimala's deeply ironic lesson
With 2019 round the corner, the political parties’ concern is understandable, although not laudable- Published 22.10.18, 6:50 AM
The
sensitiveness of deities remains unknown; it is the sensitiveness of
their devotees that is the stuff of politics. It is awkward for a
country, any country, in 2018 that women should take to the streets to
stop the entry of other women into a temple because it goes against
tradition, even though the highest court in the land has lifted the ban
and ruled in accordance with the constitutional principle of equality.
But such awkwardness is nothing but grist to the election mill for
political parties. The Left Democratic Front led by the Communist Party
of India (Marxist), being in government in Kerala, was bound to
implement the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Sabarimala temple. But why
does it give the impression that it was caught unawares by the scale of
the protests against the ruling? The ban on the entry of women between
10 and 50 years into the temple of Ayyappa seems to have been lifted
without preparing the ground for change, perhaps without adequate
attention or patience. The issue had been hanging fire long enough for
it to have been discussed extensively in different fora.
Now the CPI(M)-led government is willing to let the Travancore Devaswom Board that manages the temple to place a review petition, although the TDB seems happy to be part of the other petitions that have been filed. The CPI(M)’s present position is being seen as a climb-down by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who have been eyeing the state hungrily for a step-in. The Sabarimala protests, by bringing conservative Hindus together, offer fertile soil to the BJP-RSS, although they have denied charges that their leaders organised the protests. The Opposition Congress is in a bit of a fix, and trying frantically to seem coherent. Opposing the LDF — the Congress was never officially in favour of going against tradition in this case — puts it on the same side as the BJP. It is trying to suggest that the BJP’s encouragement of divisiveness will extend from gender to caste, but that sounds distinctly thin. Numerically strong backward classes, however, have not joined the protests. With 2019 round the corner, the political parties’ concern is understandable, although not laudable. Maybe the concern is always electoral, ignoring the need to address regressive patterns in popular thinking through education or cultural exposure. The lesson of Sabarimala is deeply ironic.
2.
kafila.org
At the end of the five-day worship in the month of Tulam, it is
clear that women have been betrayed. The right wing which promised not
to violently stop women devotees did precisely that ; their leader also
hurled vicious insults are transpeople. The dominant left which foamed
Ayyankali and Sree Narayana Guru at the mouth ended up reinforcing the
‘good woman’/’bad woman’ division, saying first that only the former
would be allowed to proceed, made the term ‘activist’ into a code word
for ‘bad woman’, and then finally threw up its hands saying that it was
impossible to implement the court order. The government and the CPM had
obviously not done enough to make sure that women would indeed enter the
shrine. Clearly they are reluctant to touch the savarna moral
majority.
Now that the pain from the blatant insult is beginning to wear off, I am wondering why, after the experience of fighting with Hadiya, we ever thought that the right or left would dare to challenge the moral majority. Let us remember that calling this a BJP-CPM confrontation, or seeing it as a struggle primarily in the field of organized, formal politics, is very superficial. Actually, the struggle is squarely in the field of the social — between the moral majority, at the centre of which are those who have coalesced since long around the savarna ideology at the heart of United Kerala since the 1960s, and the vocal and determined moral minority determined to challenge the stranglehold of the former. This is of course why the savarna moral minority is so ardently supported by the Catholic Church and most Muslim groups (with the exception, please note, of the much-maligned Popular Front!). We also know only too well that the moral majority serves elite community-caste interests and services global capitalism, given Kerala’s peculiar integration into it as a labour-sending society dependent heavily on migration.
I am also wondering why members of this moral majority are lamenting that Malayalis have become ‘culturally backward’ because of the Hindutvavaadi presence here. I wonder if they were deaf all this while to the carefully-researched critiques of the experience of modernisation of Malayali society advanced by feminist historians from the 1980s itself. Again and again, these scholars had sought to show that neither ‘tradition’ nor what came to be identified as modernity allowed gender equality; many times have they demonstrated that women’s voices were muffled, forgotten, or ignored; that the attempts to challenge masculinism in even progressive movements were never encouraged seriously. So by this reckoning we were never ‘forward’ but it appears that the intelligentsia listens to us but does continues to live in denial. If neither the left nor the right have any history of serious action on establishing gender equality on the cultural front, why I wonder were we so hopeful about the CPM? I understand that hope may not be rational, yet?
If the CPM were serious about establishing the equality of women in the Hindu faith, it would have acknowledged the fact that many of its women supporters are indeed believers and they should lead a social revolution. But they too don’t want a social revolution that would upset the balance between men and women anymore. Their support for transpeople and non-binary sexualities comes from their (mis)perception that these are merely additive moves. They don’t want to risk unintended revolutionary consequences any more, and among women for sure. Definitely, the moral majority will produce no revolution and why we were under that illusion, I do not know.
I also wonder why we were dismayed that women did not arrive at Sabarimala in droves. I mean, why did we forget the reams and reams of social research we have produced which clearly show how powerless, how utterly cornered, the average ‘respectable’ woman living in savarna culture-dominated circles is. In Kerala, women get sterilized by around 27, after delivering twice. Once the husband’s genetic pool is reproduced the wife’s body can be shifted from procreative labour into domestic labour. Research shows that few women in the lower middle class and the poorer sections of Malayali society return to studies or skill acquisition after this age; therefore Kudumbashree becomes the default option. Few of these women have stable incomes; few of them are beyond the reach of family, caste, and community authorities. The research on depression and suicidal tendencies among Malayali women of the 15-50 age group is alarming indeed. So how did we expect them to come to Sabarimala? How come we expected them to even have their own understanding of bhakti, when bhakti is completely, totally alien and inimical to the ways in which these women are integrated into the circuits of global capitalist production as producers of labour power to be sold in global markets?
I have been talking with some friends, young women believers who wanted to go, simply because of their intense curiosity about the effect of the pilgrimage … but I instantly realized why we are not seeing a surge of young women wanting to go. In fact, how dumb it is to expect it. Clearly, not one of these women can risk it, I can see. First of all, they are all young — or middle-aged, and, importantly, with young children/teenagers who are used to their care all day and night. They are dependent on in-laws or parents for substitute care, and most of these senior people are wedded to the savarna complexes that even members of the middle castes hold on to. Secondly, they are mostly unemployed. They have no money to go. Thirdly, those above 40 are caring for senior members of the family. They do not want to upset them; some are worried that if they go, the local Karayogam or its equivalent will not cooperate in the death rituals of these seniors! And finally, for many, agreeing with the utterly violent, misogynistic vomit spewed by their relatives is really, really the only option to get noticed. And of course, the only ones who can go, therefore, are the ‘activists’ who have been thrown out of the category ‘women’ by both the Hindutvavaadis and the Kerala government!
Jocelyn Chua, in her book on suicide in Kerala, says that women ‘accumulate death’ – through random threats, fantasizing etc. and that this is a way they may present themselves as moral subjects and draw attention to themselves. I say, in the silence or the raucous braying of many women who support the nauseating Hindutva violence, we see them ‘accumulating self-erasure’, as yet another way of presenting themselves as moral subjects and gaining some attention, and offering care to other members etc. Both strategies arise from sheer powerlessness of the ‘respectable woman’. I am so glad I am not one.
And also interesting is the complexity of the left version of Kerala’s moral majority. It ranges from the Minister Kadakampally Surendran’s crude Hindutva-laced ire towards ‘activists’ to the sophisticated, neoliberal self represented by the Facebook activist Resmi Nair. The first is of course familiar, but the second is to watch out for. In my reckoning it is more damaging than the anti-feminism of women on the right or left who blindly follow their leaders. Resmi Nair represents a highly mobile subject of neoliberalism who can appear to be everywhere at the same time. Her performance on Facebook calls for close analysis: she draws on the discourse of market-centred liberation centred upon consumable images of female bodies, and on radical left democratic politics simultaneously; she performs the subversion of social restrictions on women but also appears very proximate to the state and the moral majority, endorsing their idea of the ‘dissolute woman’. I have encountered such mobile subjects among women in my fieldwork of women engaging with public welfare in Kerala seeking to simultaneously inhabit state identities but resist confinement in them. But when such a strategy is adopted by privileged women, it seems to me that it reinforces the privilege and further strengthens the moral majority. Resmi Nair, for all her bikini photos, may not upset savarna power even a jot, even if she created some storms in teacups. There are many who would regard such mobility as aesthetic, and the aesthetic as ultimately political, but I do not buy that anymore. In a context in which such mobility is valuable to the capitalist market, the long term subersiveness of such strategies is indeed questionable.
Indeed, the task for feminist researchers now I think, is to focus our critical attention on the moral majority, from Kadakampally Surendran to Resmi Nair.
Now the CPI(M)-led government is willing to let the Travancore Devaswom Board that manages the temple to place a review petition, although the TDB seems happy to be part of the other petitions that have been filed. The CPI(M)’s present position is being seen as a climb-down by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, who have been eyeing the state hungrily for a step-in. The Sabarimala protests, by bringing conservative Hindus together, offer fertile soil to the BJP-RSS, although they have denied charges that their leaders organised the protests. The Opposition Congress is in a bit of a fix, and trying frantically to seem coherent. Opposing the LDF — the Congress was never officially in favour of going against tradition in this case — puts it on the same side as the BJP. It is trying to suggest that the BJP’s encouragement of divisiveness will extend from gender to caste, but that sounds distinctly thin. Numerically strong backward classes, however, have not joined the protests. With 2019 round the corner, the political parties’ concern is understandable, although not laudable. Maybe the concern is always electoral, ignoring the need to address regressive patterns in popular thinking through education or cultural exposure. The lesson of Sabarimala is deeply ironic.
2.
kafila.org
Now What? After the Betrayal of Women at Sabarimala
Now that the pain from the blatant insult is beginning to wear off, I am wondering why, after the experience of fighting with Hadiya, we ever thought that the right or left would dare to challenge the moral majority. Let us remember that calling this a BJP-CPM confrontation, or seeing it as a struggle primarily in the field of organized, formal politics, is very superficial. Actually, the struggle is squarely in the field of the social — between the moral majority, at the centre of which are those who have coalesced since long around the savarna ideology at the heart of United Kerala since the 1960s, and the vocal and determined moral minority determined to challenge the stranglehold of the former. This is of course why the savarna moral minority is so ardently supported by the Catholic Church and most Muslim groups (with the exception, please note, of the much-maligned Popular Front!). We also know only too well that the moral majority serves elite community-caste interests and services global capitalism, given Kerala’s peculiar integration into it as a labour-sending society dependent heavily on migration.
I am also wondering why members of this moral majority are lamenting that Malayalis have become ‘culturally backward’ because of the Hindutvavaadi presence here. I wonder if they were deaf all this while to the carefully-researched critiques of the experience of modernisation of Malayali society advanced by feminist historians from the 1980s itself. Again and again, these scholars had sought to show that neither ‘tradition’ nor what came to be identified as modernity allowed gender equality; many times have they demonstrated that women’s voices were muffled, forgotten, or ignored; that the attempts to challenge masculinism in even progressive movements were never encouraged seriously. So by this reckoning we were never ‘forward’ but it appears that the intelligentsia listens to us but does continues to live in denial. If neither the left nor the right have any history of serious action on establishing gender equality on the cultural front, why I wonder were we so hopeful about the CPM? I understand that hope may not be rational, yet?
If the CPM were serious about establishing the equality of women in the Hindu faith, it would have acknowledged the fact that many of its women supporters are indeed believers and they should lead a social revolution. But they too don’t want a social revolution that would upset the balance between men and women anymore. Their support for transpeople and non-binary sexualities comes from their (mis)perception that these are merely additive moves. They don’t want to risk unintended revolutionary consequences any more, and among women for sure. Definitely, the moral majority will produce no revolution and why we were under that illusion, I do not know.
I also wonder why we were dismayed that women did not arrive at Sabarimala in droves. I mean, why did we forget the reams and reams of social research we have produced which clearly show how powerless, how utterly cornered, the average ‘respectable’ woman living in savarna culture-dominated circles is. In Kerala, women get sterilized by around 27, after delivering twice. Once the husband’s genetic pool is reproduced the wife’s body can be shifted from procreative labour into domestic labour. Research shows that few women in the lower middle class and the poorer sections of Malayali society return to studies or skill acquisition after this age; therefore Kudumbashree becomes the default option. Few of these women have stable incomes; few of them are beyond the reach of family, caste, and community authorities. The research on depression and suicidal tendencies among Malayali women of the 15-50 age group is alarming indeed. So how did we expect them to come to Sabarimala? How come we expected them to even have their own understanding of bhakti, when bhakti is completely, totally alien and inimical to the ways in which these women are integrated into the circuits of global capitalist production as producers of labour power to be sold in global markets?
I have been talking with some friends, young women believers who wanted to go, simply because of their intense curiosity about the effect of the pilgrimage … but I instantly realized why we are not seeing a surge of young women wanting to go. In fact, how dumb it is to expect it. Clearly, not one of these women can risk it, I can see. First of all, they are all young — or middle-aged, and, importantly, with young children/teenagers who are used to their care all day and night. They are dependent on in-laws or parents for substitute care, and most of these senior people are wedded to the savarna complexes that even members of the middle castes hold on to. Secondly, they are mostly unemployed. They have no money to go. Thirdly, those above 40 are caring for senior members of the family. They do not want to upset them; some are worried that if they go, the local Karayogam or its equivalent will not cooperate in the death rituals of these seniors! And finally, for many, agreeing with the utterly violent, misogynistic vomit spewed by their relatives is really, really the only option to get noticed. And of course, the only ones who can go, therefore, are the ‘activists’ who have been thrown out of the category ‘women’ by both the Hindutvavaadis and the Kerala government!
Jocelyn Chua, in her book on suicide in Kerala, says that women ‘accumulate death’ – through random threats, fantasizing etc. and that this is a way they may present themselves as moral subjects and draw attention to themselves. I say, in the silence or the raucous braying of many women who support the nauseating Hindutva violence, we see them ‘accumulating self-erasure’, as yet another way of presenting themselves as moral subjects and gaining some attention, and offering care to other members etc. Both strategies arise from sheer powerlessness of the ‘respectable woman’. I am so glad I am not one.
And also interesting is the complexity of the left version of Kerala’s moral majority. It ranges from the Minister Kadakampally Surendran’s crude Hindutva-laced ire towards ‘activists’ to the sophisticated, neoliberal self represented by the Facebook activist Resmi Nair. The first is of course familiar, but the second is to watch out for. In my reckoning it is more damaging than the anti-feminism of women on the right or left who blindly follow their leaders. Resmi Nair represents a highly mobile subject of neoliberalism who can appear to be everywhere at the same time. Her performance on Facebook calls for close analysis: she draws on the discourse of market-centred liberation centred upon consumable images of female bodies, and on radical left democratic politics simultaneously; she performs the subversion of social restrictions on women but also appears very proximate to the state and the moral majority, endorsing their idea of the ‘dissolute woman’. I have encountered such mobile subjects among women in my fieldwork of women engaging with public welfare in Kerala seeking to simultaneously inhabit state identities but resist confinement in them. But when such a strategy is adopted by privileged women, it seems to me that it reinforces the privilege and further strengthens the moral majority. Resmi Nair, for all her bikini photos, may not upset savarna power even a jot, even if she created some storms in teacups. There are many who would regard such mobility as aesthetic, and the aesthetic as ultimately political, but I do not buy that anymore. In a context in which such mobility is valuable to the capitalist market, the long term subersiveness of such strategies is indeed questionable.
Indeed, the task for feminist researchers now I think, is to focus our critical attention on the moral majority, from Kadakampally Surendran to Resmi Nair.
