Co-Theorizing Gender, Caste and Politics

The volume Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality edited by Anupama Rao reverberates with conversations on several tracks that speak of the complexity of cultural politics in a deeply patriarchal society structured by Hindu majoritarianism and caste. In the context of a Hindu majoritarian caste order, Khalid Anis Ansari examines the pasmanda critique of the majority-minority and its pursuit of transformative constitutionalism and democratic symbolism (p. 320), pointing out that in its practice of politics, ‘it confronts all the challenges that any counter-hegemonic identity movement faces in its formative phases… [and yet] the pasmanda struggle for a post-minority politics is ongoing and there is hope that it will democratize Indian Islam in the long run’ (p. 320).

Religion and sexuality are at the centre of the politics of caste-gender in Hindu majoritarian India, and at the centre of anti-caste resistance. Sharmila Rege recalls Dr. Ambedkar’s 1936 speech to devadasis in Kamathipura: ‘…the Mahar women of Kamathipura are a shame to the community…There are only two ways open to you: either you remain where you are and continue to be despised and shunned, or you give up your disgraceful profession and come with us’ (cited p. 196). As a counterpoint to this view, Lucinda Ramberg probes ways of locating the religious and sexual subjectivity of Dalit women and offers a provocation drawing on her work with devadasis: ‘It is as bad subjects whose behaviour exceed modern protocols of decent womanhood and proper religion that they find room for manoeuvre and means of critique’ (pp. 37-38). The tension between modernity and the incitement of ‘non-modern’ forms of religio-sexual practice may not be understood in a linear reading.

Stepping away from the hermeneutical forms of ‘[m]arginality and loss, paucity and disenfranchisement’ (p. 109), Anjali Arondekar poses two questions: ‘What happens if we abandon the historical language of search and rescue and focus instead on sexuality and caste as sites of radical abundance—even futurity? What would it mean to let go of our attachments to loss, to unmoor ourselves, as it were, from the stakes of reliable ghosts?’ (p. 110). She approaches these questions through her work on the Gomantak Maratha Samaj tracing the emergence of a ‘Devadasi Diaspora’ (p. 111) that interrogates stable narratives of loss and recuperation. Qudsiya Contractor reflects on the challenge posed to mainstream discourse on Muslim women as docile victims by Qureshi women who participated in the public protest against beef ban in Mumbai, and urges us to focus on ‘[Muslim women’s] praxis as a way of understanding their ways of doing’ (p. 307).