Not By Faith Alone: Religion, Gender and The Public Domain in India

Abstract

This article examines some aspects of the fraught relationship between the reform/defence of Hinduism and the activities in India’s heterogeneous public domain by studying a connected set of texts/issues from three distinct historical conjunctures: (i) the Malayalee poet Kumaran Asan’s celebrated poem Chintaavishtayaaya Sita [Sita Immersed in Reflection] (1919) in the context of backward caste demands for inclusion and equivalence under colonial rule; (ii) the Dravidian leader E.V. Ramasamy Periyar’s polemical interpretations of Hindu epics and patriarchal theism between the 1950s and 1970s in the context of Dravidian counter-nationalism as well as the juridical provisions restricting the freedom of expression in order to protect religious sensitivities; and (iii) the American artist Nina Paley’s feminist animation film Sita Sings the Blues (2008) which was sought to be suppressed by Hindu activists but has been acclaimed widely and distributed for free by the film-maker over the internet. Each of these initiatives involves a “new” interpretation—or what Derek Attridge terms “act of reading”—of the epic Ramayana from a gendered perspective; and this article examines how each of them signals transformations in public life and political subjectivities as a consequence of these re-articulations.

I thank Indrani Mukherjee and Saugata Bhaduri for inviting me to the conference on “Gender Studies and Expanding Horizons of Inter/Trans-Culturality” at Jawaharlal Nehru University in March, 2013, where this paper was first presented. Discussions at that conference as well as conversations with Susie Tharu, Madhumeeta Sinha, Madhava Prasad, K. Satyanarayana, Uma Bhrugubanda, M. Parthasarathi, Colin MacCabe, Dirk Wiemann, and Lars Eckstein helped me fine-tune some of the points, and publish a preliminary version of the same in Critical Quarterly (Vol. 56, No. 3, October 2014). This article is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the original paper.