Epic Legacies: Hindu Cultural Nationalism and Female Sexual Identities in India 1920-1960
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Epic Legacies: Hindu Cultural Nationalism and Female Sexual Identities in India 1920-1960 Pria Taneja Queen Mary College, University of London Ph.D I declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own, and that work published and unpublished by others has been clearly referenced. Signed:…………………………………………………………………. Contents 1. Acknowledgments 2. Abstract 3. Introduction 48. Prologue: Present Misery For Past Glory, Or, Delight and Disgust: Hindu Women in the work of William Jones and James Mill 83. Chapter One: The Object of Controversy: (Re) Forming Hindu Women 163. Chapter Two: The Epic Model of Chastity 192. Chapter Three: The Finest Flower of Indian Heritage and Culture: Exploring the Context and Location of C. Rajagopalachari’s Epics 245. Chapter Four: ‘Woman But Not Female’: The Epic Model of Chastity in C. Rajagopalachari’s Ramayana and Mahabharata 321. Conclusion 331. Bibliography Acknowledgements My maternal grandmother Satya was married at sixteen and had to change her first name to one chosen by her in-laws when she did so. She lived in Lahore and in the great migration of August 1947 became a refugee with millions of others. She settled in Delhi, along with her three small children and husband. She lost everything in the Partition, and I do not think she ever recovered from the experience. My paternal grandmother Leela was married at thirteen, had her first child at fourteen, and was widowed by the age of thirty-five with five children. She always wore white, she never re-married or worked. Neither of them ever spoke about their experiences or what they had lived through. This thesis is, in part, their story. I would like to thank Bill Schwarz who took a floundering student and project and turned them both into something good. Thank you to my father, Dr Neelam Taneja and my sister, Preti Taneja, two inspirational people to whom I owe so much. Thank you to my dear friend, Helena Wisden who should be thanked for so many things, not just this. Thank you my dear Jonathan, for everything, everything. This thesis is for my mother Meera 1947 -2004. Thank you for staying with me. 1 Abstract Epic Legacies: Hindu Cultural Nationalism and Female Sexual Identities in India, 1920-1960 The thesis investigates the cultural interventions of Hindu nationalist, C. Rajagopalachari (CR), by offering a close reading of his re-tellings of the Hindu epics, The Mahabharata (1951) and The Ramayana (1956). It positions them alongside the writings of M. K. Gandhi and the key responses to Katherine Mayo’s controversial text Mother India (1927). The thesis explores the central female protagonists of the epics – Sita and Draupadi – asking how these poetic representations illuminate the ways in which femininity was imagined by an influential Hindu ideologue during the early years of Indian Independence. Using close textual analysis as my principal method I suggest that these popular-literary representations of sexual identities in Hindu culture functioned as one means by which Hindu nationalists ultimately sought to regulate gender roles and modes of being. I focus on texts emerging in the years immediately before and after Independence and Partition. In this period, I suggest, the heroines of these versions of the epic texts are divested of their bodies and of their mythic powers in order to create pliant, de-sexualised female icons for women in the new nation to emulate. Through an examination of the responses to Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), and of Gandhi’s writings, I argue that there one can discern an attempt in the Hindu Indian script to define female sexual identity as maternal, predominantly in service to the nation. These themes, I argue, were later articulated in CR’s recasting of the Hindu epics. CR’s epics represent the vision of gender within Hindu nationalism that highlights female chastity in the epics, elevating female chastity into an authentic and perennial virtue. I argue, however, that these ‘new’ representations in fact mark a re-working of much older traditions that carries forward ideas from the colonial period into the period of Independence. I explore this longer colonial tradition in the Prologue, through a textual analysis of the work of William Jones and James Mill. Thus my focus concerns the symbolic forms of the nation – its mythologies and icons – as brought to life by an emergent Hindu nationalism, suggesting that these symbolic forms offer an insight into the gendering of the independent nation. The epics represented an idealised model of Hindu femininity. I recognise, of course, that these identities are always contested, always unfinished. However I suggest that, through the recasting of the epic heroines, an idea of female sexuality entered into what senior Hindu nationalist and Congressman, K.M. Munshi, called ‘the unconscious of India’. 2 Introduction (i) Research Questions and Method This thesis explores the connection between emergent Hindu nationalism and the cultural representation of female sexual identities. The thesis traces the nexus of concerns around the representation of the female body and women’s identities in India between 1920 and 1960, and attempts to explore through close textual reading of a Hindu nationalist version of the epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana by C. Rajagopalachari (CR), the idea that the iconic main female protagonists, Sita and Draupadi, were subject to a ‘strategy of disembodiment’ and that this strategy had implications for the way in which women were represented in nationalist discourses in modern India. My research attempts to expose how the re-worked epics conceived of women’s identities and sexual identities in these influential stories, and considers the role of these re-worked identities in the cultural discourses of Hindu nationalism. The ‘strategy of disembodiment’ is a literary technique whereby these, and other important female figures are actually disembodied. For example, the author relates that they are turned to stone, made of mist, or are illusions; their bodies are obscured by clouds or fragrances; or they are silenced by having words put into their mouths. A close-reading of the episodes where ‘strategies of disembodiment’ occur in the re-told epics can be understood as signals of the attempts by ideologues of Hindu nationalism to organise symbolically the representation of female sexual identities. The thesis explores 3 the idea that, by representing the (disembodied) epic heroines as cultural icons for emulation by women in the new nation, the texts contributed to the shaping of a female identity that was de-sexualised and in service to the masculine priorities of the nation, for example as guardians of culture in the home, or as chaste nationalist mothers. A further question that emerges through the close-reading of the epics and the other texts in this thesis is: how was the contest between nationalism and sexuality presented? I wish to engage with the idea that, to some extent, nationalism is always gendered and 'sexualised': all nationalist projects attempt to mobilise men and women in different ways, and may call upon a range of gendered images, for example, heroic men, or self- sacrificing women. The literary analysis of the texts presented in the thesis studies how those gendered images underwrote the idea of the new nation, and further questions how the contest between nationalism and sexuality manifested itself as twentieth-century nationalists, for example CR, began to develop a Hindu nationalist version of a new culture for India. I plan to examine renditions of two of the most important symbolic manifestations of Hindu culture – the epics – as re-told by eminent politician, freedom-fighter and Hindu nationalist, C. Rajagopalachari (1879 – 1972). In doing this, I will attempt to investigate the connection between emergent Hindu nationalism and the representation of women and female sexual identities The thesis also explores some of the other discourses, texts, ideas and images that emerged from the arena of Hindu nationalism between 1920 and 1960 in order to ask what the connections are between the values of Hindu nationalism and the suppression of women’s sexual identities in India. I propose to investigate these connections through 4 close textual reading and literary analysis of certain key texts written by Indian men who identified themselves as speaking for the nation and contributing to the formation of a new national culture for India. Part of the content of this new culture was the setting of the boundaries for female behaviour and identity. In this Introduction, I will offer some of the historical definitions of nationalism and Hindu nationalism, and then go on to map out a theoretical framework for the literary analysis of texts that follow in the thesis. I will then conclude by discussing my choice of texts and anticipate some of the arguments that follow. (ii) Nationalism Historian Eric Hobsbawm asserts that: there is no a priori definition of what constitutes a nation.1 He begins by asking the question ‘What is a (or the) nation?’ He identifies a key element in the constitution of the nation – that is that the claims of the group who belong to it purport to exist in a way that is fundamental and primary, even though ‘the nation’ is a relatively new formation. Hobsbawm argues that despite attempts to establish a central criteria for nationalism – such as language, or common geographical space, or a common history or culture – these components, singularly or combined do not provide a 1 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 8. 5 satisfactory definition.2 There is a good reason for this: ‘nations’ are essentially unstable categories in themselves, being: historically novel, emerging, changing, and even today far from universal entities.3 As such they are very difficult to fit into categories or definitions that are permanent and universal.