Gandhi's Tiger and Sita's Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture

By Ruth Vanita

Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile presents a collection of compelling essays which interrogate a variety of Indian texts and contexts along intersecting axes of gender, nation, and desire. The primary theme that weaves these varied essays together, written at different points of time with varying focal points of interest, is intertextuality. Vanita examines the way in which medieval texts speak to each other and draw on earlier canonical works, rewriting and transforming narrative in a spirit of respectful conversation. She also looks at modern texts, such as nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction and cinema, as they converse with each other and with older texts. In doing so, she tries to explore how such pre-modern and modern texts are received in later periods or by other cultures in the same period. These captivating and intensely thought-provoking writings demonstrate the author’s superb ability to turn the norm, whether Right-wing or Left-wing, on its head, and find a fresh way to appreciate diversity and change, and the valuable dialogue they give rise to. Written in a style that is informed by scholarship yet accessible to the general reader, and boldly addressing a number of issues which South Asian society would ‘rather not talk about’, this is a timely volume which effectively narrows the looming gap between sexuality and gender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: YODA PRESS
• Release date: Apr 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9382579389

Ruth Vanita

Ruth Vanita makes a quiet impact with her lucid and understated style. Hers is primarily a poetry of relationships, of distances and absences. She experiments with form and meter, often juxtaposing age-old stories with contemporary events to create poems of extraordinary power and beauty.'Vanita has a quiet, firm and self-assured voice that treats even the raucous with classical containment. ... It is a voice one would like to hear more often.' - Keki N. Daruwalla

Book preview

For Saleem Kidwai

‘… they have seemed to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced as it were from the ends of opposed winds.’

Contents

Title page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Politics and Power

Love and Friendship

Pleasure, Play, Transformations

Copyright

Preface

In 1999, I wrote an essay entitled ‘Thinking Beyond Gender in India,’ which discussed questions of gender and sexuality in the context of Indian women’s movements. The essay was reprinted thereafter and appears in a revised form in this volume. The remaining essays in this collection, written over the last five years, go beyond that ‘beyond’, to interrogate a variety of Indian texts and contexts along intersecting axes of gender, nation, and desire, addressing both the material and the representational. A couple of these essays grew out of seeds planted during my years at Manushi. Most others emerged from further research in areas that first opened up to me while working on Same-Sex Love in India and my subsequent books, Queering India and Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West. All have profited from my interactions with colleagues as well as students in the Indian and the American academies, and activists in both countries.

Intertextuality is a primary theme in these essays. I am interested in the ways in which medieval texts speak to each other and draw on earlier canonical works, rewriting and transforming narrative in a spirit of respectful conversation. In very different registers, modern texts, such as nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction and cinema, also converse with each other and with older texts. Another equally interesting but distinctly different area of enquiry addressed in these essays is the way texts are received in later periods or by other cultures in the same period.

I have tried, throughout, to remain aware that human subjects, though shaped by categories such as age, sex, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, class, caste, cultural background, nationality, and race, are not wholly contained by them. The multiple dimensions and shifting aspects of human existence blur and exceed even the most apparently fixed categories, such as biological sex (as the advocacy movements of intersexed people, formerly known as hermaphrodites, now remind us); humans also often move between categories, create new categories, and construct varied meanings for existing categories. This fluidity permeates textual representation as well; I am interested, therefore, not in judging texts by the categories (such as gender, caste, class) into which the putative authors supposedly fit, but by the debates, affiliations and visions for change that the texts represent.

A word about style and format. Written at different times and places, in different states of mind, these essays reflect my aspiration to write in a style informed by scholarship yet accessible to the general reader. I depart from the convention of surveying the scholarly terrain in an introduction; many of the issues (class, caste, communalism, nationalism, globalisation) routinely raised in such a survey are implicitly or explicitly addressed in the essays that follow. I prefer that readers encounter my interventions in these contested intellectual territories in the local instance, with reference to particular texts or events, rather than in the abstract.

All translations are by me unless otherwise indicated. The themes under which the essays are grouped are intended as suggestions, not watertight compartments. These essays wander across temporal, disciplinary and linguistic lines; the thread that holds them together may be summed up in E.M. Forster’s epigraph, ‘Only Connect’.

Acknowledgements

The following essays appeared in somewhat different form in anthologies and journals; all of the essays have been revised and some have been rewritten for publication here. I thank the editors of these anthologies and journals and the anonymous readers whose comments helped me refine the essays. ‘Thinking beyond Gender in India,’ appeared by the same title in Gender and Politics in India, edited by Nivedita Menon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 529–39, and was reprinted in Feminism in India, edited by Maitrayee Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Kali for Women & Women Unlimited, 2004), pp. 69–79. ‘The Self Has No Gender: A Female and A Male Scholar Debate Women’s Status in the Mahabharata.’ appeared as ‘The Self is Not Gendered: Sulabha’s Debate with King Janaka,’ in NWSA Journal, Volume 15, Number 2 (Summer 2003), pp, 76–93. A brief version also appeared in the magazine Hinduism Today. ‘Gandhi’s Tiger: Multilingual Elites, the Battle for Minds, and English Romantic Literature in Colonial India’ appeared by the same title in Postcolonial Studies, Volume 5, Number 1 (2002), pp. 95–110. ‘A Rose by Any Other Name: The Sexuality Terminology Debates’ contains material from my Introduction to Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, edited by myself (New York: Routledge, 2002), and some materials from the Note on Methodology in Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (New York: Palgrave; New Delhi: Penguin, 2005). ‘Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left?’ appeared by the same title in Seminar: the Monthly Symposium, April 2002.

Some of the materials in ‘God as Sakhi: Medieval Poet Janabai and Her Friend Vithabai’ appeared in my essay, ‘Three Maharashtrian Poets: Muktabai, Janabai, Bahinabai,’ in Manushi, No. 50 (Tenth Anniversary Issue on Women Bhakta Poets), and in an expanded and rewritten form as ‘At All Times Near: The Figure of the Sakhi and Love between Women in Two Medieval Indian Devotional Texts’, in Same-Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Francesca Canade Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Some of the materials in ‘Gender, Language and Genre: Hindus, Muslims, Men, Women and Lesbian Love in Nineteenth-Century Urdu Rekhti Poetry’ appeared in ‘ Married Among their Companions: Female Homoerotic Relations in Nineteenth-Century Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India’ in the Journal of Women’s History, Volume 16, Number 1 (2004), pp. 12–53. Materials in this essay and in the essay on Dosti and Tamanna appear in different form in Love’s Rite. ‘Tragic Love and Cultural Convention: Reading The Well of Loneliness in India and the US’ appeared by the same title in Mastering Western Texts: Essays on Literature and Society for A.N. Kaul, edited by Sambudha Sen (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 262–79. ‘Social Deviant, Disabled Victim or Normative Human Being? Love Rewrites the Plot in Dosti and Tamanna’ appeared as ‘Dosti to Tamanna: Male-Male Love and Normative Indianness in Hindi Cinema’ in Everyday Life in South Asia, edited by Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb (Indiana University Press, 2002). ‘The Many Colours of Love: Homerotic Tropes in Modern North Indian Fiction’ and ‘Playing the Field: Homoeroticism in Modern Indian Advertising’ contain materials from ‘Homophobic Fiction/Homoerotic Advertising: The Pleasures and Perils of Twentieth-Century Indianness’ which appeared in Queering India, pp. 127–48, and some materials from Same-Sex Love in India. ‘Sita Smiles: Wife as Goddess in the Adbhut Ramayana’ appeared in Manushi, May–June 2005. ‘I’m an Excellent Animal: Cows at Play in the Writings of Bahinabai, Rukun Advani, Suniti Namjoshi and Others’ appeared as part of ‘Embracing the Past by Retelling the Stories’ in A Sea of Stories: The Shaping Power of Narrative in Gay and Lesbian Culture, edited by Sonya L. Jones (New York: Haworth, 2000), pp. 139–63). Some of the materials in ‘Pleasure or Moral Purpose?: Conflict and Anxiety in Modern Hindi Translations of the Kamasutra’ appeared in my essay, ‘The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century,’ in Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000; New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002). A small part of ‘Disability as Opportunity: Sage Ashtavakra Mentors Bhagiratha, the Disabled Child of Two Mothers’ appeared in ‘Wedding of Two Souls: Same-Sex Marriage and Hindu Traditions’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 20, no. 2, Fall 2004, pp. 119–36, and in Manushi January– February

Most of these essays were presented in draft form at different venues, including the Women’s Studies Program, University of Michigan; South Asia Program, Cornell University; South Asia Program, University of California at Berkeley; Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York; Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; McGill University; Seattle University; University of Alberta; Swarthmore College; Purchase College; Kalamazoo College; Hobart and William Smith College; Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry annual conference, 2004; Annual South Asia Conferences at the University of Madison, Wisconsin in 1998 and 2000; and The Modern Language Association Convention, 1999; I thank the organisers for giving me these opportunities to present work in progress and the audiences for comments which helped me refine my ideas.

Thanks to Madhav Deshpande for teaching me Sanskrit, and to Saleem Kidwai and Darshan Kang for teaching me Urdu and helping me translate rekhti poems. Thanks too to Saleem for his generous and helpful comments, over the years, on most of these essays. Thanks to Shohini Ghosh for her comments on some of these essays, and to Leela Gandhi, Shiv Ganesh and Rachana Kamtekar for comments on ‘Gandhi’s Tiger.’ I gratefully acknowledge the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, who jointly awarded me a fellowship for 2003–4, during which time I wrote some of these essays. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to my colleagues in the Liberal Studies Program, University of Montana, for their warm support of my work, and to the University administration for granting me a sabbatical for the year 2004–5, which enabled me to put this volume together. Finally, as always, thanks to my better half, Mona, for her never-failing help, support, input and advice.

RUTH VANITA

Politics and Power

Thinking Beyond Gender in India¹

The words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are universally translatable into most known languages. There are and have always been many humans who do not fit into either of these categories; some are born biologically intersexed and others, though biologically male or female, feel that they belong to the other gender or to both genders. Many cultures also acknowledge a third and even a fourth or fifth sex.

Notwithstanding all of this, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are primary categories in most known societies. Although there are important differences in the ways the man-woman relationship is structured in different societies, these differences are less important than the basic similarity of the relationship, premised upon a normative heterosexuality, geared towards reproduction of men as a dominant group and women as a subordinate group.

The similarity is fairly evident cross-culturally even between societies that are very different in many respects. For example, wife-murder in India is often projected as a unique cultural phenomenon, often termed ‘dowry death’ even when it has little do with dowry. The similarity between wife-murder in India and in the US was startlingly captured in the story of Nicole Simpson whose history of enduring violence at the hands of her husband, concealing its extent from the public gaze, suffering pressure from her family to stay with her husband, is so similar to most cases of wife beating escalating into wife-murder that occur in India. That more Indian than American women may end up dead in such situations has much to do with the greater affluence of American society, which makes it possible for American women to more easily find employment and housing, and to leave violent domestic situations before they get killed.

Focusing on so-called dowry deaths or widow murders in India or, conversely, on the high rate of male abandonment of women and children in the US, tends to foster a syndrome of what might be called ‘Our patriarchy is better than yours’.³ This syndrome functions both at the collective and at the individual level, and within society at large as well as, more insidiously, within women’s movements. Furthermore, focusing on atrocities, as the media tends to do both in India and the West, functions both to threaten and to reassure most women. The average woman is subliminally persuaded that she should be grateful if her husband does not beat or kill her, while she is also reminded that he might have the power to treat her in these ways.

The atrocity, as a spectacular text constructed by the media, laws, and protestors, works to legitimise rather than to undermine the normative structures of male-female relationships. For every one reported police rape taken up by women’s groups in India, there are hundreds of unreported routine marital rapes, and for every one case of severe wife beating there are hundreds of cases of more routine, less severe violence in marriage.

INDIAN WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS AND MARRIAGE

In the late 1970s, one of the main theoretical differences between women’s organisations affiliated with political parties and autonomous women’s groups was supposed to be that the former emphasised economic rather than gender issues and the latter gender over economic issues. Twenty years later, the differences seemed far less important because in actual practice all of us were doing very similar work—what might be called firefighting and band-aid application. We were constantly responding to three kinds of requests: first, requests to help a woman change a violent marriage into a routinely unhappy one; second, less frequent requests to change an unhappy marriage into a happy one; and third, to help a woman and/or her natal family take revenge on her husband and in-laws who had frustrated, neglected, injured or killed the woman.

Although different organisations had started out with different agendas and political positions and although these differences remained in theory, women activists in general, to different degrees, ended up functioning as marriage counsellors, retrievers of dowries, and legal aid providers. Families frequently demanded of the organisation in which I worked that we function like a macabre wedding or divorce band by showing up at the husband’s home to noisily protest the demise of a marriage. Some families grew quite belligerent when we resisted such pressure, and criticised us for not performing our function as a women’s organisation. We were also, from time to time, required to provide shelter to women in distress, mostly battered wives, but occasionally unwed mothers or harassed daughters.

Significantly, unless they themselves were the targets of protest, most families and most men who came in contact with our women’s organisation, as also most government agencies and officers, including the police, applauded our work and thought of us as social workers doing useful work, as indeed we were. We were keeping heterosexual structures in repair by functioning as unpaid relief workers, welfare workers and counsellors of the kind that the government does not provide free of cost, and that most people cannot afford to pay. In a society where women suffer so much pain, such relief work certainly needs to be done, and perhaps everyone should contribute a certain number of years of their life to doing it, like a sort of tithe or tax.

However, it was clear that by doing this work we were not getting any closer to ending violence against women. To work for the preservation and strengthening of the institution of heterosexual monogamy as the only viable partnership model, and simultaneously aspire to end violence against women is to be under a delusion, much like the wife who appeals to activists to reform her husband. With the exception of a few small groups and individuals, most people share the basic assumption that, although there are many abuses within heterosexual monogamy, this system is nevertheless the best available and no alternatives to it need to be developed.

For example, two young Hindu women in Chandrapur, Maharashtra, went to the Registrar of Marriages and declared their intention to marry. At this time, national women’s organisations were drafting proposals for changes in the Hindu Marriage Act and the Special Marriage Act. It so happens that the Hindu Marriage Act (no doubt inadvertently) does not, in its initial definition of the parameters of the Act, specify the sex of the partners involved. Local officials and the police pressured the younger of the two women to give up the idea of marrying her woman lover. But women’s organisations did not take cognizance of the possibility of another type of marriage or press to have it legalised.

Nor have national women’s organisations undertaken any thoroughgoing discussion of compulsory monogamy. While monogamy is no doubt the choice of many and a viable option, there is no reason why it should be compulsory for everyone and the only form of marriage available. Different communities in India have practised polygamy and polyandry, practices now outlawed for most communities. We tend to confuse the undesirable economic and other inequalities built into these practices with the practices themselves. A residual Puritanism also induces us to focus more on the inequalities of polygamy or polyandry than on the sharp inequalities often prevailing in heterosexual monogamous marriages.

For instance, those who wish to abolish verbal talaq often confuse the inequality at present built into it (whereby the husband can unilaterally divorce the wife) with the practice itself, which, if stripped of gender inequality, would be merely no-fault divorce on the basis of incompatibility. That either partner should be able to end the marriage unilaterally without citing reasons is based on the idea that no one should be forced to live with someone they do not wish to live with. A person should not have to vilify his/her spouse in order to end the marriage.

What is undesirable about verbal talaq is that under Indian Muslim law only men have this right to end a marriage. In fact, Islamic law has a provision called khula, which is in operation in some Muslim countries, whereby a woman can exercise a similar right. She can leave her husband even if he does not wish to leave her, merely by making a payment; this is parallel to the way a husband who gives his wife talaq is supposed to pay her mehr.

Introducing khula and building economic safeguards into talaq, which can be done because Muslim marriage is a contract and any kind of safeguard or provision can be written into the marriage contract, could transform Muslim divorce law into the most progressive divorce law in the country.⁴ Unlike the law in most other democracies, Indian marriage laws do not allow an individual to divorce his or her spouse on grounds of irretrievable breakdown or incompatibility, if that spouse does not agree to the divorce. This breeds huge quantities of unnecessary acrimonious litigation, since a person who wants to leave her/his spouse (if that spouse does not agree to a divorce) has to prove that the said spouse is somehow at fault, rather than alleging simple incompatibility.

Why does the idea of abolishing talaq have an emotional appeal that the idea of introducing khula does not? Because the nearuniversal assumption that heterosexual monogamy is the best practice makes it easier for people to accept the idea of imprisoning men in monogamous marriage in the way most women already are imprisoned, but difficult to accept the idea of providing both women and men with easy escape routes from unhappy marriages.

Many women’s organisations oppose the idea of allowing divorce on grounds of incompatibility, arguing that many men will take advantage of it to abandon their wives and remarry, while few women will have the resources to opt out of unhappy marriages. The fact that men who wish to do so already abandon their wives without divorcing them, and that women need economic safe-guards built into the divorce law rather than provisions that prevent their husbands from getting a legal divorce, does not cut much ice with these organisations. Some of them are invested in claiming the higher ground for Indian culture and society, arguing that the ease with which people can legally divorce and remarry in Western democracies has led to a breakdown of the family.

In fact, no society practises only heterosexual monogamy. Indian society certainly does not. Since most Indians marry, separate and remarry without necessarily informing the state and since many people, especially men, maintain long-term extramarital liaisons, the Indian government does not have reliable statistics regarding marriage, divorce, and single parents.

It is no longer possible to argue for monogamy as an absolute principle since legal divorce and remarriage for both men and women now prevail in all the communities that make this argument. The principle actually dominant in modern society is serial monogamy, which was always available to many men and is now available to some women too. Once we accept that monogamy can only be relative, not absolute, then expressions of shock at polygamy or polyandry are out of place.

FOSTERING POSSIBILITIES

At some point in its development, any women’s movement must take one of two directions both at the level of thought and of action, or, more likely, must work out a combination of both directions: (a) that of repairing the structures of heterosexual marriage and family, making them somewhat more equitable, and (b) rethinking gender and sexuality to liberate humans into developing different kinds of family and living arrangements. People in any society always work out a range of forms of familial living. What a movement can do is foreground and validate the less dominant, more liberatory, forms.

Women’s movements in India have, by and large, taken the first direction—that of reforming marriage or rather the laws and social codes associated with it. An overall concentration on people, especially women, as victims rather than agents, and a reluctance to question gender and sexuality categories has fostered a stress on equity rather than liberation.

Most people are dissatisfied, to different degrees, with being men or women. As philosopher Monique Wittig points out, the word ‘woman’ is no more redeemable than the word ‘nigger’, or, we might add, the word ‘choora’, and the word ‘man’ than the word ‘white’. The categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are illogical categories based on certain parts of the body, which may or may not be used to certain predefined ends. We might as well divide all humans into big-eared and small-eared people, and hope to work out a sane society based on such a division (what would happen to mediumeared people or earless people?!).

In all societies, persons who are dissatisfied with the heterosexual system to the point of not wishing to gain the rewards of fitting into it, have devised different ways of opting out, individually and/or collectively. In Wittig’s words, ‘The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not.’⁵

In India, hijras function as one visible model of difference. More than one older woman friend has told me, half playfully, half seriously, ‘I’m a hijra,’ a statement reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s claim that she was neither a man nor a woman. As an experiment I have asked many non-feminist women friends of differing class, age and marital status whether they would like to be reborn as men or women, and have received the answer, ‘Not as a woman.’ Some have said they would like to be birds.

Unfortunately, the articulation of such feelings has often been silenced in feminist circles, by ascribing it to low self-esteem or even self-hatred. On the contrary, I would argue that it is related to high self-esteem, based on the perception of oneself as not the complementary of a man, not wishing to play roles vis-à-vis men that could be defined as womanly, and therefore, not being, for any practical or social purpose, a woman. Conversely, overemphasising one’s womanhood when opting out of an incompatible marriage produces the kind of feminist victim narrative which so many modern Indian women writers of fiction in different languages have endlessly repeated, where the body of the text is taken up with the struggle to get out and the text ends as soon as the heroine does get out, because there is logically nowhere for her to go except another marriage, suicide or lonely depression.

Persons who opted out of heterosexual structures in the past produced other kinds of narrative, and a few modern Indian writers have claimed these narrative traditions. The lives of mystics, both in India and in Europe, follow a trajectory of critique, protest and opting out of the heterosexual system, followed by the formation of alternative community and friendship networks. Many inheritors of such patterns exist today, for example: throughout the period of terrorism and police brutality in Punjab, the Radhaswami Satsang continued to function as a mass forum where Hindus and Sikhs met and worshipped together.

One feature common to the legends of almost all medieval bhaktas and sants, men and women is that they refused to be good spouses and good parents. Many women refused to marry; and those who were married left their husbands. This feature is also found in the lives of medieval mystics in Europe. Some women chose to be nuns or anchoresses rather than wives. Frideswide in tenth-century England is supposed to have called upon her patron saints, who performed a miracle that blinded her prospective husband and ended his pursuit of her; she then went on to found and head a double abbey (for men and women) which later evolved into Oxford University. Another medieval saint, Wilgefortis, miraculously grew a beard to discourage a suitor. Women worshipped her with offerings of oats, and gave her the name ‘Uncumber’, because they hoped she would unencumber them of their husbands. Avvaiyyar in medieval Tamil Nadu is supposed to have performed a miracle which turned her into an old woman so that her prospective husband gave up pursuing her.

Both men and women altered gender categories by trying to strip them of meaning—by walking naked, by growing their hair long, and by rethinking the terms in which gender is socially defined. Thus, the twelfth-century Kannada Virashaiva poet Dasimayya wrote:

Suppose you cut a tall bamboo in two;

make the bottom piece a woman, the headpiece a man;

rub them together till they kindle: tell me now

the fire that’s born,

is it male or female, O Ramanatha?⁶

Women mystics wrote narratives of power and creativity outside of the family and the formal educational system. They functioned as models for other women. Mahatma Gandhi cited Mirabai as a model for women. When a little girl was born to a follower, he said he hoped she would become a Mirabai. There are many such unconventional models to legitimise women’s opting out. For was almost never in the house. Since she had taken a vow of celibacy she had no further conjugal relations with her husband, who went to live with another son. As the family found the special food she cooked unpalatable, she ended up cooking only for herself. While the family resented this behaviour, they found it hard to forbid it.

Similarly, another friend’s aunt left her husband to join a Jaikishen Ashram in Maharashtra. In India today, as in pre-modern Europe, institutions of fasting and pilgrimages still provide many women with access to mobility and ways to devise lives not entirely constrained by familial responsibility.

CHALLENGING ANTHROPOMORPHISM

A new relation to the universe is often envisaged through the idea of being an animal. The last boundary to be crossed is that of the species. To acknowledge that we are animals and that that is the most important thing we have in common across class, caste, nation, race, and gender lines is perhaps a necessary first step towards dissolving those lines. Regardless of physical and mental abilities or disabilities, humans have in common with other animals, especially mammals, the capacity to suffer pain, to age and to die, and also the capacity for enjoyment, communication and play. Our basic irreducible needs for food, water, air, sex, shelter and companionship are also needs we share, to different degrees, with other animals, especially mammals.

I am increasingly convinced by the argument philosophers in many cultures, including many feminist philosophers, have made, over centuries, that it is not possible to significantly reduce human violence against other humans, including male violence against women, unless we also simultaneously reduce gratuitous human violence against other animals, the scale and enormity of which exceeds most of our imaginations. A little thought would lead us to realise that human civilization is based on mass torture and slaughter of living creatures, much of which is avoidable, and that cruelty to humans is only one dimension of this ongoing senseless cruelty⁷. Women too are complicit in this violence: women’s movements in India need to address this complicity and discuss strategies to redress it.⁸

The lives of non-human animals often demonstrate to us the relative unimportance of gender. In the writings of mystics, power and achievement is often ungendered, as in Nizamuddin’s remark, quoted at the beginning of this chapter; conversely, small and weak creatures symbolise the powerless who become powerful. Thus thirteenth-century Varkari poet Sant Muktabai writes:

An ant flew to the sky

And swallowed the sun.

Another wonder—

A barren woman had a son.

A scorpion went to the underworld,

Set its foot on the Shesh Nag’s head.

A fly gave birth to a kite.

Looking on, Muktabai laughed.⁹

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. This paper, first presented at a conference on Indian women organized by the South Asia Program at Cornell University in 1995, articulates some of my reflections on women’s situation and women’s movements, based on 13 years of working as founding co-editor of Manushi, a journal about women and society, and as a feminist activist involved in many campaigns relating to violence against women and also to civil rights. In the years since this essay was written, Indian women’s movements, largely under pressure from lesbian and gay movements, activists and writers, have become somewhat more open to discussing questions of gender and sexuality. However, my overall argument still remains pertinent.

2. Aviva Cantor, ‘The Club, the Yoke, and the Leash: What We Can Learn from the Way a Culture Treats Animals’, Ms (August 1983), p. 27.

3. For the idea that wife-murder is the consequence of women’s social and economic powerlessness, in which dowry is sometimes but not always a factor, that dowry rarely is the only factor, and that, in the absence of inheritance, dowry often empowers women, being the only form of inheritance available to them, see Madhu Kishwar, ‘Rethinking Dowry Boycott’, Manushi, No. 48 (1988), and ‘Towards More Just Norms for Marriage’, Manushi, No. 53 (1989), Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, ‘Inheritance Rights for Women,’ Manushi, No. 57 (1990), and Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

4. Some Muslim