Books

PERFORMING REPRESENTATION: Women Members in the Indian Parliament by Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary. Oxford University Press, 2019.

WOMEN, POWER, AND PROPERTY: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India by Rachel E. Brulé. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

WHEN Pamela Paxton included women in defining democracy, she found that incorrect operationalizations (which often measured only male suffrage and political rights) affected scholars’ measurement of transition dates to democracy, their descriptions of the emergence of democracy, and their understanding of the causes of democratization.1 What happens if we include women’s behaviour when defining what representation means? What happens when we recognize that women are constrained and freed in different spaces in different ways, because they are embedded within many identities and structures beyond their gender, and they have interests that pertain to many of these groups? 2,3,4

These questions bring together a way to read two recent books on representation in India: Performing Representation by Shirin Rai and Carole Spary (2019), and Women, Power, and Property by Rachel Brulé (2020). At first glance they take very different approaches to studying women representatives in India, but in fact provide a way of redefining representation without the male gaze.

Brulé studies the effects that women’s representation in gram panchayats has on the enforcement of gender-equalizing legal reforms for women, while Rai and Spary study women’s representation in Parliament through a framework of ‘politics and performance’. While they appear as different frameworks that study different institutions and come to different conclusions about women’s representation in India, reading them together offers insights into a new approach to studying representation – one that could re-theorize what it means when women are included in our observations of representational behaviour.

Rai and Spary’s ambitious tome, Performing Representation, delves into the performances of women Members of Parliament (MPs). Some of their primary contributions to the field are in the many dimensions that they cover, as well as the study of representation through a novel ‘politics and performance’ framework. A central question of the book is: ‘Does the persistent underrepresentation of women in Parliament affect our reception of the performance of representation and the claims to being a strong democracy in the broader politics of the country, and if so how’ (p. 5)? Unlike gram panchayats, where quotas ensure that women are represented at higher proportions, there are no quotas in Parliament. Rai and Spary study how women perform in such a situation of scarcity.

‘Performance and politics’ is an institutional approach, but the analytical magnifying glass is placed in particular on the symbolic, the discursive, the aesthetics, and claim-making around the ways in which rules and procedures play out within Parliament. This framework is used alongside narrative research and ethnographic literature to guide their analyses. In particular, they study gender and representation at three levels: first, they consider the pathways that women take to getting selected for election; second, they interrogate how intersecting social structures (class, caste, religion, education, and profession) affect women’s ability to perform their duties and garner resources; and third, they interrogate how women are (not) able to negotiate the pressures of their public and private roles. Their analysis focuses on 23 women in a 10-year period in two Parliaments – the 10th Lok Sabha (1994) and the 14th Lok Sabha (2004), and on both women and men MPs between 2009-2016.

Drawing from its nuance, description, and complexity, I make a few observations about what this book teaches us about women’s representation in India. First, the authors show specific ways in which ‘scripts of womanhood’ enter into how women behave in Parliament. In other words, expectations about how women should and should not behave based on the roles they play in their homes and communities shape both their own behaviour, and the way that other MPs interact with them, in Parliament.5 Women do not automatically represent the interests of ‘women’ or even of particular types of women – for example, ‘women MPs temper overt critiques of Indian patriarchal society with more conciliatory tones to manage conflict and backlash’ (p. 165). They must take care to not be overtly conflictual,6 which is another example of a learned behaviour that is used as evidence for essential difference. There is no escape – ‘women in politics are very much made aware of their position as women when they enter the political field, whether they like it or not’ (p. 166).

Second, the ways in which political institutions work in concert to amplify or mitigate structural inequality – for elections, the incentives of political parties – are important to studying how and where women representatives have space to maneuver.7 Spary and Rai explore the importance of party political support in recruitment, re-nomination and re-election of incumbent women MPs over successive parliamentary terms. As one woman MP says, ‘Parties keep changing their view…now even within our party women get unwinnable seats – she loses, then they say women lose, then they [men] start saying that women should stay at home; I say we can do both – look after the family and work in politics’ (p. 305). Studying representation within just a single institution misses important parts of the puzzle of how the presence of women representatives does or does not translate to different modes of governance.

Finally, Rai and Spary use qualitative codes in studying the performance of women and men politicians, helping us to go beyond dichotomous studies of success and failure. For example, their study of how women’s contributions in parliamentary debates are received and interpreted (in Chapter 5) delineate seven different response-types (promoted, lauded, acknowledged, prevented, ignored, silenced, or delegitimized). While some of these response-types may also be used in response to men politicians’ contributions, others may not be and there may be asymmetric effects on how representatives do the work of representing based on gender. By typologizing response-types, inquiries into the dynamics and nature of representation can be addressed in future research on representation.

Rai and Spary provide us with leverage into seeing that when women are in power, they may be performing politics in a different way than we are used to categorizing ‘types of representation’. This is because women negotiate complex institutional and social terrains and gender role performances. Performance as a framework adds a valuable, descriptive and conceptual approach to a field dominated by quota-inspired natural experiments to interpret effects of women’s representation while often using narrow definitions of what such representation actually means or looks like. It brings us vital insights into how women traverse the fraught terrains of being political representatives.

Brulé’s book, Women, Power, and Property, takes a very different perspective from Rai and Spary’s: she investigates the effects of women’s representation through local-level quotas. Her approach to politics is centred on economics, bargaining, and intrahousehold negotiations. Her central empirical argument delineates a causal relationship between women’s political representation and their economic power (in particular, land ownership). Perhaps even more than the causal inferences, Brulé’s theory on how women’s representation impacts enforcement of their economic rights and subsequent welfare prompts some of the most intriguing questions and ways forward for thinking about the study of representation.

The argument of Women, Power, and Property is that political power through quotas transforms: ‘simply reserving the highest elected position in a given village government for a woman can set in motion seismic waves that unsettle this entire system’ (p. 9). Brulé argues that quotas for women in local-level councils lead to the enforcement of their property rights, which can also lead to backlash and resistance from family members and negative externalities like lower rates of daughter births. However, quotas also transform resistance into support through ‘integrative bargains’ in societies with moderate socioeconomic inequality, where Brulé theorizes that there is more potential to coordinate around new social norms.

A key element of Brulé’s theory focuses on marriage negotiations – particularly around dowry – as a critical moment for women to acquire land inheritance from natal family. Here, women sarpanches – gatekeepers – may come in as catalysts and facilitate ‘integrative bargains’ between unmarried daughters and their family members. She argues that in a simultaneous decision-making model of bargaining, ‘a brother may be willing to cede significant inheritance rights if his sister simultaneously offers not only to deny any groom who demands dowry but also to choose a marriage that enables her to share a duty of caring for elderly parents. The brother benefits by offsetting the loss in exclusive property rights by minimizing other monetary obligations (to transfer land for dowry) and social obligations (shared care for elder parents)’ (p. 46). Brulé also posits that there is an overall welfare gain for the household – ‘the family has avoided selling valuable ancestral land to pay for a daughter’s dowry and is able to distribute inheritance rights equally to a daughter and son, without reducing a son’s quantum of inheritance’ (p. 46). Her argument contributes to study of women’s representation in three ways. First, its focal point centres around a negotiation between family members around the institution of marriage – a critical point for women. Second, it expands the repertoire of governance actions of representatives to also being behaviours inside of what was often considered ‘private’ space of the household (and thus out of the realm of public politics). Third, it leads us to put our analytical gaze on the social norms within which representation is deeply embedded.8

Brulé’s theory of ‘integrative bargains’, and the role that women sarpanches play in them, forms the backbone of the causal story of the book. It bears food for thought for the overall study of democratic representation. Conceptually, is the hypothesized mechanism here – women sarpanches helping families to compromise and negotiate – equivalent to ‘enforcement’, or is this a wholly new type of political behaviour on the part of representatives? Do natal families really want to give their daughters land when the economic tradeoffs are equal for the sons and other members of the family? And how much agency does the average daughter have in negotiations – for example, the choice to give up dowry (what of parents who begin to save up for dowries from the minute they have a girl child)?9 In this social milieu, would the natal family prefer to distribute inheritance rights equally as long as there are no economic costs? Further study of non-economic preferences here is perhaps as important as understanding the economic ones. Brulé’s theory lays out fascinating areas for further research by shining a light on the very household and community spaces and institutions (such as marriage) that particularly matter for both women citizens and women representatives.

These studies prompt us to think about what the representation of women by women means, in two different institutions and through two different methodologies. In considering these works together, we come away with fruitful inspiration to interrogate the ‘traditional’ way of thinking about politics. The books illuminate that when women enter traditionally male spaces, they behave (and ‘represent’) differently than men politicians. This is because women representatives face challenges unique to their position in Indian society – for example, they must ‘compromise’ and ‘adjust’ inside of political institutions order to be taken seriously. They also encourage others to compromise, and this becomes part of their governance style. In effect, women ‘do’ politics differently – not because they are essentially different, but because they have very different constraints both inside and outside of the political institutions that they enter and negotiate. Scripts of Indian womanhood, and its intersections with the other social structures they are embedded in, follow women wherever they go. When thinking about what happens when they enter political institutions, conventional views of representation have no way of assessing how compromise enters a female representative’s actions.

After reading Brulé and Rai and Spary’s studies, we might ask: how can we study the politics of representation without a male gaze?

1. When are political institutions forced to see inside families, and when do they still find ways to turn a blind eye? Feminist judicial scholar Catharine MacKinnon has written extensively about the fiction of ‘private’ spaces.10,11 Much of women’s subordination is reinforced through the way that the state chooses to define what is private, and hence explicitly chooses not to regulate, privileging group or family norms over individual rights. It is not a coincidence that the space in which women face the most violence and subjugation has always been that which the state deems as the ‘intimate’ and the ‘private’. Brulé shows us, however, that when women are sarpanches, new focal points and spaces could become ‘public’. For example, marriage negotiations between family members and between families – traditionally in the realm of ‘private’ and ‘community’, could come under the state’s purview in some circumstances. How can the state make those circumstances more readily available? What actors are replaced (e.g., traditional caste elites) when it does?

As James Scott says in Seeing Like a State, ‘we must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.’ 12 This is especially true for women’s lives – which the state often chooses not to see by deeming the spaces they spend the majority of their lives in as ‘private’. What happens when the state – through women representatives – observes different focal points in its citizens’ lives than it traditionally has (because it has only seen and mapped the society that it governs through men representatives’ and bureaucrats’ eyes)? This is a ripe area for further research.

Conversely, the state may also be completely resistant to making such observations, even when thrust directly before it. As Rai and Spary show, familial support matters deeply for women MPs’ recruitment and career trajectories in Parliament, but party institutions and Parliament do not change their tactics to ‘see’ this and support it. Women MPs often do not want to be the spokespeople for ‘women’s issues’. Though the family could become a new focal point because of women MPs’ entry into the institution of Parliament, various institutional rules, procedures, and norms of operating prevent that from happening. Understanding when the state ‘sees’ a new aspect of citizens’ lives, versus when it continues to designate it as ‘private’ space is central to our understanding of how the state operates and governs and an important avenue for further studies on women’s representation.

2. We need new typologies to characterize and describe ‘the work that politicians do’ when women are also politicians. Much of what politicians do happens in society, and outside of political institutions. Women representatives may engage with the citizenry – not just other women, but also men – differently than men representatives do. For example, a social script that many women are expected to follow is one of persuading and encouraging compromise in complex emotional and social negotiations between family members. This is a particularly valuable skill to have as a mediator in disputes and negotiations between citizens - many of which are between family members. While men sarpanches may also get involved in different types of disputes, women sarpanches involve themselves – their role in negotiation facilitation – differently.

The counterfactual to the woman sarpanch intervening in marriage negotiations in Brulé’s book is the man sarpanch either intervening in a different way, or not intervening at all. Regardless of how widespread and effective the negotiation actually is, the fact that women representatives may get involved in this way in citizens’ lives is a different manner through which politics happens on the ground. Thus, women representatives may negotiate and act differently not only inside, but also outside of the political institutions that they become part of. How do we characterize all the new, ‘non-traditional’ (perhaps non-male is a better descriptor) forms of ‘political work’ that women sarpanches may be doing? What new forms of representation and state responses may come out of asking this question?

3. How do we look beyond hegemonic male models of leadership? Theories of women’s representation need to more explicitly use the logic of gendered constraints to describe what kinds of agency women choose to exert and where, based on both institutional parameters13 and the scripts their societies and households expect them to play. Women have agency, but what, how, and when they choose to strategize, and how they exercise agency are different from what we have seen or theorized about before within political institutions. Women are most frequently inside of their homes, and sometimes in smaller community spaces. Historically, we have not seen the ‘ways’ of representing that women perform in political institutions because it has not empirically existed. Since this is a very recent phenomenon, I believe we are still using old theories about what men representatives do to study what women representatives are doing. What if instead, we theorized based on the scripts that women follow in their households and communities and the constraints that the new spaces they are entering (e.g., Parliament, gram panchayat) impose? Women perform within rigid constraints in gendered political institutions, and how they perform is different based on institutional history and rules/procedures.

For example, Rai and Spary illustrate how women have to perform according to their gender roles to be recognized, accepted, and heard in Parliamentary spaces. Their analysis interprets that women are more likely to perform ‘service’ than ‘leadership’. However, ‘service’ is often also seen in the performance of male politicians and the organizations that support them. The RSS, of course, stands for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the concept of ‘seva’ and the man ‘sevak’ has a long political history in India.14 So how is the performance of ‘seva’ of the women Parliamentarians in Rai and Spary different from that of men parliamentarians? It is likely different in different spaces (e.g., in front of fellow Parliament members in sessions, versus in front of citizens), and in its particular performance (e.g., distributing services to the poor,15,16 versus taking care of families and family members’ sensitivities17 – both different forms of service). It may also be different based on the other social structures that women are embedded in – for example, caste.18 Investigating the history of gendered roles and scripts of elected officials in different Indian communities would help us understand how women representatives expand the repertoire of political behaviour in various spaces.

A feminist, historical understanding of representation is an important first step for theorizing and testing hypotheses about the effects of women entering and staying inside of political institutions, and in studying institutional rules, norms, and procedures. While we know a lot about how women’s reservations and descriptive representation correlates with various outcomes in particular contexts, we know much less about how women’s presence has the potential to change how the state sees and governs, what spaces it governs within, and what political institutional procedures and norms may be helping or hindering the expanded repertoire of political behaviour and representation that results when women representatives enter the picture. Delving into the assumptions, mechanisms and performances that Brulé, and Rai and Spary highlight in their absorbing works inspires us to approach studying representation from a fresh lens: one which casts aside a scholarly male gaze and expands the boundaries of what democratic representation actually is.

Surili Sheth

PhD Candidate, Political Science

University of California, Berkeley

GENDERING MINORITIES: Muslim Women and the Politics of Modernity by Sherin B.S. Orient Blackswan, New Delhi, 2021.

Gendering Minorities: Muslim Women and the Politics of Modernity by Sherin BS is a critical intervention on the intersection of gender politics and minority politics, with a particular focus on debates in Kerala. The book analyses the entanglements of multiple identities such as minority, religious and gender in situating the agency of Muslim women’s position in Kerala.

Primarily, Sherin BS questions the metanarratives surrounding the Muslim women’s question in Kerala, which is abstractly centred on the binary of oppression and resistance. Here, Muslim women are categorized as victims who need saving from the patriarchal male culture of the minority Muslim community. This has become a hegemonic discourse across the whole range of the political spectrum, exemplified in the pan-Indian discussions on the Shah Bano case and further reflected in the mainstream feminist discourse in Kerala.

Second, Sherin BS problematizes the appropriation of gender discourse by the Hindu nationalists and other Islamophobic forces to systemically vilify the Muslim community. Sherin BS’s approach opens a new pathway to identify and think through these entanglements of power, subjectivity, and freedom in contemporary feminist discourse in Kerala through a post-foundationalist framework. Sherin BS’s task is not to abandon the foundation of feminism but to identify the changing foundations and contingencies of feminist politics to extricate the complex and ever-evolving subjectivity of minority Muslim women.

The first chapter is a historical reconstruction of Muslim women politics in Kerala by mapping the history of Muslim women’s political and spiritual participation. The singular emergence of Muslim women agency is traced from the premodern Indian ocean world to 20th-century Islamic reform movements. The author mainly explores the evolution, continuity and discontinuities of matrilineal traditions and practices of Muslims in Kerala and further argues that Muslim women’s agency is a central constitutive feature of the Muslim community’s political existence in Kerala. Sherin BS analyses two key figures: Arakkal Beevi, ruler of the Arakkal Kingdom, a Muslim dynasty in Kannur, and Beema Beevi, a saint-preacher who hails from Trivandrum in order to show how the historical role of Muslim women as rulers and spiritual leaders has been crucial in the formation of Islam in Kerala.

The second chapter explores Muslim women’s agency in the context of Islamic reform movements in Kerala by rethinking the politics of gender, modernity, and religion in Kerala. The reformist efforts of Hindu upper caste males are widely considered the driving force of Kerala’s so-called progressive cultural space. The socio-political engagements of anti-caste, non-Brahmanic leaders like Ayyankali and Sree Narayana Guru have also received recognition within mainstream discourse after the emergence of subaltern movements. However, the Muslim reformist movements were sidelined in the historiography of the reform movements of Kerala. Muslim identity itself is marked as backward and regressive in mainstream narratives, and it has been reproduced through the images of uncivilized, patriarchal Muslims in popular movies and literature, despite their social mobility and renaissance through education and transformative encouragement and acceleration of women’s participation in various fields of society and politics (p. 91). As Sherin BS rightly points out, the uniqueness of Muslim reformist movements is completely ignored in the existing narrative of the Kerala renaissance.

Through this systemic ignorance, the ‘burden’ of patriarchy – which is universal to all reform movements – is misconstrued as the exclusive problem of Muslim others to make space for the progressive claims of modern Kerala. The otherization of the Muslim community in Kerala happens through a selective invocation of gender discourse. For instance, the early Muslim women reformist intervention of Haleema Beevi is deliberately excluded from the mainstream reformist rhetoric in Kerala. This is served to construct a patriarchal minority community that is less progressive, less gender sensitive and less secular compared to an ever-evolving progressive Kerala society. But the books show that Muslim women activists were involved and reconfigured gender relations within the Muslim community in the light of Islamic theological and political language over the last hundred years. Sherin BS summarizes: ‘In their engagement with modernity, Muslim women attempted to accommodate the newly defined cultural space, redefining and internalising modernity integrated with the spiritual strength of Islam, which is usually construed as the antithesis of modernity.’ (p. 127)

The final chapter is based on the contemporary debates on gender and Islam in Kerala. Sherin BS critically reviews the Malayalam novel Barsa (2007) by Khadija Mumtaz. The novel has received wide recognition in the Kerala public sphere as a critical feminist literary text to popularize gender issues within Muslim communities. Sherin BS observes that the reception of the novel is coupled with the post 9/11 context of Islamophobia and discourse on Islamic fundamentalism in Kerala (p. 166). Mumtaz develops a critical insider perspective to address gender issues within the Muslim community. However, Sherin BS argues that Mumtaz’s critical reflection homogenizes Muslim women’s lives in a singular narrative of oppressed Muslim women and fails to engage with the operations of Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia in producing the gendered narratives of Muslims and Islam. The third chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of other literary and political narratives in the academic spheres of Kerala.

Sherin BS’s broader aim is to reimagine the Muslim women’s question from a minority inclusive framework rather than exclusive gender discourse. One of the possible drawbacks is its focus on the minority status of Muslim women and its clubbing with the religious identity of Muslim women subject. Her analysis oscillates between the tensions of minority studies and Muslim women studies. However, the religious questions of Muslim women demand an autonomous interrogation considering the recent shifts in Muslim women studies across the globe. Nevertheless, Sherin BS’s reading is a rare attempt in contemporary scholarship to trace the construction of Muslim women in the history and politics of Kerala.

Ummul Fayiza

PhD candidate, School of Law

University of Warwick, UK

WAITING FOR SWARAJ: Inner Lives of Indian Revolutionaries by Aparna Vaidik. Cambridge University Press, UK, 2021.

AFTER a long silence that followed the works of David Laushey and Manini Chatterjee on Bengal revolutionaries, a clutch of serious historical studies has begun to appear in recent years: on the Ghadr Party, on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Party, and, above, all, on Bhagat Singh. They explore new territory: women comrades of revolutionaries, the literature they wrote and inspired, popular lore and representations in different media – to mention just a few themes.

Vaidik’s monograph makes several important departures within this stream, and I will begin with two very major ones. Despite the lure of Bhagat Singh’s image, she chose to focus on Chandrasekhar Azad: a somewhat forgotten and shadowy comrade of Singh who began his political career with the Congress, then joined the Hindustan Republican Party and eventually migrated into the HSRA and became their chief logistical organizer. Long overshadowed by Singh’s charismatic image, Azad, however, seems to have gathered some recent valorization during the 2017 celebrations of Independence which I should mention. Central government televised portrayals tucked away the socialist and atheist Singh somewhere in the middle of a long line of revolutionaries. But Azad is placed at the head, with the janeyu prominently displayed.

Vaidik forms a bridge between the less-known HSA and the HSRA. She also encompasses several other political formations in North India, as she tracks Azad’s colourful career. In between, he had also joined a monastic order in order to procure its funds for the revolutionary cause: an ambition which he gave up in disgust when the chief monk refused to die soon, leaving Azad as his successor. Vaidik’s narrative allows us many such fascinating and unexpected glimpses into revolutionary lives. It is also populated with an impressively large cast of characters who surrounded Singh and Azad, in all their mutual interactions and relationships.

Vaidik chose Azad as the central figure in order to clear up a somewhat distorted image of the HSRA as a gathering of committed socialists alone – an image created by Singh’s later turn to Marxism. By turning the focus on the non-socialist and determinedly brahmanical Azad, she is able to bring out the political diversities among the comrades. She could, perhaps, also have added something about their religious and caste thinking. She does mention the Arya Samaj linkages of several figures but what that meant for them is not quite clear. She also mentions that Azad never abandoned his brahman identity: but what else did this involve apart from the ever visible janeyu? Indeed, since the times were beginning to swell with vicious communal antagonism, one wonders if they had thoughts about inter community relationships. The influence of Bankimchandra’s Anandamath was, as she points out, enormous in creating an example of armed patriotic ascetics. But Anadamath also contained the first communal hate speeches which were extremely powerful: how did the revolutionaries respond to that? Anandamath, moreover, portrayed the persistence of love and even occasions when desire did find an outlet – punishment, however, was deferred till the mission was accomplished. How did the stern celibacy of revolutionaries resonate with those passages?

The last of the HSRA group to be apprehended by the police, Azad was a master of infinite disguises – Vaidik’s term for him is bahurupiya or a professional entertainer who can assume multiple personas. We have heard a lot about how Bhagat Singh eluded the state as he went around as a Sahib. It seems Azad’s range was even broader. In fact, the book begins with a very interesting account of his travels as he assumed dizzyingly pluralized personalities: from a sanyasi to a mechanic. One would have liked to know a bit more about methods of police surveillance which eventually tracked him down.

Despite Vaidik’s disclaimer that Bhagat Singh is not the chief protagonist of her narrative, he does often share centre stage with Azad. Moreover, both lives are intricately interwoven with many others: Sachindranath Sanyal, Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, to mention just a few. In fact, Vaidik could have emphasized the unique presence of a Muslim among these revolutionaries which practically never happened in other armed groups. A Bengali Muslim later wrote how he was spurned by the terrorist organization which he had wanted to join. The pledge in the name of Kali, and the elaborate Hindu initiation ceremony stood in the way: perhaps also strengthened somewhat by communal distrust. In this context, I find it somewhat surprising that the initiation ritual is missing in Vaidik’s work, as are the words of the pledge they took.

The second critical departure lies in Vaidik’s emphasis on the quotidian life of revolutionaries. She makes a very important point. We remember this group as young men who are hungry for action: throwing the bomb, raiding homes and trains, shooting the Sahib and the final embrace of martyrdom. Vaidik, however, reminds us that the moments of actual action were few and far between, and they were also brief. Most of their time as revolutionary conspirators was spent in waiting – preparing and disciplining themselves endlessly for action. Those activities occupied the bulk of their political life which, in any case, was remarkably short-lived: cut down by arrests, prison or the gallows. In fact, Azad was the only one of his group who could evade arrest for a long time after Saunders’ killing.

The revolutionary-everyday was a time for bodybuilding through an exacting regime of exercises, supervised by Azad. But it was also a time for intense reading – as Vaidik shows, the HRA and the HSRA members were surprisingly voracious readers of world revolutionary literature. Vaidik provides us with an exhaustive catalogue of what they read, and it really surprised me to find so many of the pre-Bolshevik Russian Narodnik and anarchist classics among them. Bengal revolutionaries, in contrast, read more of the Irish literature. A question, however, remains. Did they read them all in their complete English translations, or did they use abbreviated versions, or even brief summaries of these works in other books. Chernyshevsky’s What is To Be Done – a very important resource for Bhagat Singh, as Vaidik shows – in particular is a large and multilayered tome and it is surprising that Bhagat Singh could have procured an unabridged translation. It would have added to this important aspect of their intellectual life if we had more information about what they made of their rather eclectic readings that came out of conflicting political perspectives: Narodniks themselves had multiple strands, even apart from the Bolsheviks and Anarchists. What accounts for the different preferences of the HSRA members, for clearly Singh and Azad belonged to quite different political stocks? Did they read the books selectively?

A significant point that emerges from the book is the breadth of their political thinking – in contrast to Bengal’s Anushilan and Jugantar who, in this phase, were preoccupied with methods of assassination alone. In this regard their manifesto is really remarkable because it visualized independent India quite precisely as a loose federated republic instead of a tightly centralized unitary state. Vaidik could have explained the preference more fully.

Vaidik reveals that there was more to the revolutionary-everyday than plotting the killing and the dying. It is delightful to read about their jokes and quarrels, their love for the cinema and for Chaplin, their ability to compose songs and to sing, their impatience with the meager diet in dens where Azad ensured that the hard-earned funds would be kept aside for those destined to be sent for action first. Suddenly we recall that these were young men with a sense of humour, a capacity for great mutual affection, occasional bouts of greed for milk and sweets. Their banter is especially captivating and the stories they made up about how each would be caught and die according to his favourite foible are hilarious rather than black gallows humour. One would have expected a bit more about their political discussions and arguments but, perhaps, the sources – memoirs, biographies and recollections – do not allow for that. One also misses a fuller discussion of the mutual perceptions of Gandhians and revolutionaries about each other.

In fact, Vaidik’s narrative actually lends itself to an interesting contrast and comparison between Gandhian and revolutionary ideas. Both shared a similar preoccupation with dietary regimes, about sacrifice, about asceticism and renunciation of desire, about the detailed art of self-discipline. Like them, Gandhi, too, believed that the ascetic patriotic body should also be virile: strength lies in perpetually cultivating and repressing male potency.

Vaidik, however, points out an interesting contrast with Gandhians: the easy camaraderie among revolutionaries and the lack of hierarchy and a command structure. That, too, is very different from the Chittagong revolutionaries for example where members had to abide by the orders of Surya Sen all the time even when these irked them.

One wonders what actually lay behind the absolute sexual self abnegation of these healthy young men who enjoyed – even when they rarely had them – some other pleasures of life. Did their dread of family life and marriage come from an anterior fear of heterosexuality that drove them into the celibacy pledge, rather than the notion that abstinence provides moral and physical energy? Vaidik has pointed out the possibility of homoerotic vibes.

There is a relative neglect of their relationship with their families which they left behind to face the undoubted wrath of the British. What did they feel about the parents and siblings they had abandoned, many of whom would have depended on them in old age?

Let me close this with one of the most striking aspects of the monograph: the eroticism which framed the image of revolutionary death. If they did control their impatience for the day of action, it seems they could barely control their longing for death. They hungered for the kiss of the noose, they called the gallows their chosen and beloved wife, they imagined how death would come to them, they thought of death as marriage. Apart from the aura of patriotic martyrdom which surely drove them to this path, what else was involved in this dream of death – for young men who had barely known life as yet? Or was it precisely because life and its manifold beauties and possibilities were still unfamiliar that they could embrace the certainty of death so ardently?

The book is a pleasure to read, combining, as it does, rare analytical acumen and important insights with a very wide range of readings on global revolutionaries. Written in a captivating manner, it recreates revolutionary manhood in its diverse plurality, in its profoundly human qualities, with its fun, foibles and problems – instead of merely freezing the characters in gestures of deathless heroism and martyrdom. All this, however, without subtracting an iota from their limitless courage and idealism.

Tanika Sarkar

Professor of History

Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi

THE DREAM OF REVOLUTION: A Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan by Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad. Penguin Random House, Gurugram, 2021.

Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) saw many dreams but had his share of nightmare visitations too. His dreams were going rather well in the early years of his political life but at the end the nightmares came crashing through.

JP’s best, perhaps also his happiest, days were when he was Jawaharlal Nehru’s close companion and trusted ally in the 1930 and early 1940s. He was a dependable enfant terrible, and a great backup source for the restless socialist wing in the pre-Independence Congress party. Nehru and he had similar dreams, but JP’s failing in those days, and later too, was that he believed in them in his waking hours as well. Time and again, there were rude knocks on the door, but JP did not heed them.

While his first disagreements with the Congress began with Sardar Patel, Rajagopalachari, and Rajendra Prasad in pre-independence times, Nehru disappointed him as well in Independent India. Reluctantly, but firmly, he often criticised Nehru for not being vigilant enough on human rights and for letting authorities physically attack working class strikes. Congress’s record after 1948 did little to cheer JP and he even complained how in Uttar Pradesh the party was turning ‘fascist’ as it was unmindful of workers’ rights to protest and strike.

The Partition years were difficult for JP to accept, but he did not fault Nehru for that. What he could not ignore was when radical measures, as he saw them, were cast aside by Congress under Nehru, for the sake of political expediency. Though this left him bitter, he still nursed an emotional and ideological affinity with Nehru. If one were to go by the letters they wrote to each other, this feeling was profoundly mutual. Their disagreements never became acrimonious and his daughter inherited this goodwill till she blew it with the Emergency.

For a full-bodied awareness of all this, and much more, we are lucky to have a sensitive, detailed, and critically appreciative biography of Jayaprakash Narayan by Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad. This father-daughter effort is, of course, a tribute to JP, but this volume is also a daughter’s tribute to her late father, Professor Bimal Prasad, and what a fine tribute it is to both.

It was JP’s ideological restlessness that led him to continuously scan the political horizon for a safe and friendly harbour to dock. The two ports he instantly, and instinctively, stayed away from were the ones that were outright communal or bourgeois right wing and, of the two, his distaste for the former was greater. He opposed all forms of communalism and like Nehru, he saw majority communalism as a greater threat. That one begets the other was not entirely lost on him. This is why he openly condemned the Muslim League too for fostering exclusiveness and non-involvement with the upsurges that were enveloping British ruled India.

Later when the Ranchi riots broke out in 1967, JP was livid with rage at the way massacres were carried out. Unsparing in his criticism he angrily remarked, ‘There must be something terribly wrong with our upbringing, with the religious beliefs that have been inculcated in us, the education that is being imparted, the group attitudes that are being developed by assiduous propaganda to make it possible for human beings to change suddenly into bloodthirsty monsters.’

The authors of this volume adroitly highlight JP’s rare gift to see subtleties of shade where others saw just black and white. It is this that set him apart from most intellectuals around him and also made him a perennial political misfit. For example, his criticism of the two nation theory took a turn quite unlike the usual argument that spoke of goodwill and historical conviviality. Instead, JP raised a theoretical issue when he questioned the convergence between nation and state in the minds of many commentators.

Accordingly, JP drew attention to the fact that Britain was one state but had several nations like the Scots, Irish and Welsh in it just as French, German and Swiss coexist in Switzerland. Why then, JP asked, can’t Hindu and Muslim nations live amicably in a single nation state? The idea of ‘two nations’ was not debunked, as is often the case. The complication JP’s problematic raised was: ‘Why should this multiplicity (or diversity) matter when it comes to making a unified nation-state?’ Yes, there may be more than one nation in India’s nation-state, so what? Once this issue was placed upfront, the tenor of the debate underwent a drastic change.

It was this ability to view several established opposites as subtleties that probably explains why JP found it difficult to drop ideological anchor and settle down. His student years in America opened his mind to high political theory which he read as avidly as he did Steinbeck and P.G. Wodehouse. He came back to India a socialist but soon disassociated himself from Soviet style communism. JP astutely recognized that the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was a bogus one and that this doctrine was never there in any of Marx’s works. JP could have well added that in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had clearly said that communists should never form a party; a warning that Leninist Marxists simply ignored.

Later, when he was drawn to Mahatma Gandhi, non-violence for him was not an inviolable dogma. At one point he even felt that should there ever be a Gandhian state, the ‘Stalins of Gandhism’ would make a mess of it just as Lenin’s successors had mangled the Soviet Union. Again, by viewing social facts as a subtle engagement of passions JP could justify why a bayonet wielding soldier deserved humane treatment in a prisoner of war camp.

The Gandhian streak in JP lingered for long inspite of his equivocations on non-violence. What appealed to him most was the sense of self sacrifice for the larger good which he felt was so quintessentially what the Mahatma preached. To that end JP organized a voluntary band of young activists who would combine philanthropy with social uplift to energize redistribution of wealth but without cataclysmic outcomes. It was never violence versus non-violence, or socialism versus capitalism, in their pure and absolute terms that attracted JP. For him it was important to work along the cracks and interstices of these ideological blocks and thus render them meaningful to everyday people.

This is why when Naxalism was growing in India in the 1960s, JP found himself reluctantly supportive of their spirit of rebellion as there was so much injustice in the countryside. However, he was critical of the CPI when it asked its followers to come to a protest meeting for land redistribution armed with sticks and spears as he felt this was an unwarranted justification of violence. His involvement with the Bhoodan Movement clearly indicated where he stood on violence versus non-violence, but that did not blind him to the injustices that the poor routinely faced.

This probably explains why JP stayed for as long as he did in the Congress though he had leading figures in it level serious charges against him. At one point in 1932, JP was even called the ‘Congress brain’. JP’s political involvement became even more tricky as his advocacy of partyless politics was expressed time and again while he himself was an integral part of a party. Later in the closing decades of the 1950s, JP passionately embraced Gandhian values and even advocated village republics and self-sufficient agro-industrial communities. Sadly, these high sounding views stayed as vague and impractical as they were when originally formulated by Gandhiji in Hind Swaraj.

There was then space for Marx and for Gandhi, just as there was space for the idealist in Nehru but also for the feisty Ram Manohar Lohia. The Congress Socialist Party had a diverse membership base. At one extreme there was Swami Sampurnanand, who was inspired by Vedantic ideals, and then there was Minoo Masani, an avowed Fabian. JP had no hesitation in straddling both these dimensions, as long as there was unanimity on the ideals of socialism.

It was not just Soviet style communism that JP found abhorrent, but he also disagreed with the easy equation of calling acts such as that of bank nationalization socialist. More importantly, for JP socialism could claim a legitimate place only after it had first ushered in democracy. His insistence on this principle comprehensively separated him from the communists of his time. People may accuse JP of being untidy in many of his political positions, but not on this one.

Though JP did fall out in the post-Independence years with Nehru and Lohia, for different reasons, of course, he never deprived them of his affection. He left the Congress fold to establish the Praja Socialist Party (PSP) in 1952 to underline the importance of achieving socialism without violence and Bolshevik conspiracies. Later, when he found the socialists were getting no traction, particularly with reference to labour and land struggles, he quit the PSP. He now readied himself to dive into Gandhian politics and this is what led him to Vinoba Bhave and the Gramdan-Bhoodan movement.

Predictably, he soon found fault with this approach too as it was far too subservient to goodwill and less inclined to apply pressure. In his heart, he had not forsaken the Congress altogether either. Initially, JP was on Indira Gandhi’s side and even congratulated her when she became the prime minister. He was all praise for her in the way she handled the Bangladesh crisis. In his letters to her, he addressed her as ‘Indu’. Soon, however, ‘Indu’ became ‘Indira’ and then ‘prime minister’ in step with his mounting criticisms against Indira Gandhi’s policies. His disenchantment with her began with bank nationalization and then climaxed sensationally with the Emergency of 1975. When JP was incarcerated post-Emergency in 1976, he wrote that the treatment meted out to him then was much worse than the way the British treated him in Lahore Fort jail

JP’s dream years were in the 1930s and early 1940s when he was seen as Jawaharlal Nehru’s chosen one and likely successor. His escape from Hazaribagh Jail in 1942 was a sensation and it made him an immensely romantic figure. Gradually, his differences with Nehru resulted in JP drifting towards a more socialist position, hence his PSP affiliation. That was not the end of it, there were other disappointments on the way. After his born again Gandhian attachment to Bhoodan movement waned, he was tempted to abandon politics altogether.

The decade of the seventies was when JP scripted both his dramatic rise and fall. In 1974, he found himself as the leading mascot of the Bihar agitation to dissolve the Assembly. He rather cherished this position for he felt that he could finally realize his dream of ‘total revolution’. But he was really deluding himself. It did not take long for this vision to become a dreadful disappointment as it broke into several pieces along predetermined party lines. Even Morarji Desai, as prime minister, ticked off JP when the latter queried about inner party decision making. It was JP, after all, who had given credibility to and buoyed the Janata Party and now he was being rudely sidelined. The dream of ‘total revolution’ soon dissolved and became his nightmare.

This biography of Jayaprakash Narayan by late Professor Bimal Prasad and his daughter, Sujata Prasad, is a labour of love to the dreamer who had to meet a tragic end for he dreamt too hard. Though the story this biography relates is sympathetic to JP, it is far from being hagiographic. The many errors of judgement that JP made, his naivete with regard to the Bhoodan movement, and indeed his unrealistic expectations of the Janata Party are presented unadorned. It is also a touching and painstaking effort by a daughter to bring her father’s efforts to fruition. Professor Bimal Prasad had envisioned the book, had done the ground work for it but, sadly, did not live long enough to finish the project. It is to Sujata Prasad’s credit that she brought to a fine conclusion what her father had started. With this book, JP lives again!

Dipankar Gupta

Retired Professor, School of

Social Sciences, JNU, Delhi

Footnotes:

1. Pamela Paxton, ‘Women’s Suffrage in the Measurement of Democracy: Problems of Operationalization’, Studies in Comparative International Development 35(3), 2000, pp. 92-111.

2. Maxine Molyneux, ‘Mobilisation Without Emancipation’, Women’s Interests, States, 1985.

3. Susan Franceschet and Jennifer M. Piscopo, ‘Gender Quotas and Women’s Substantive Representation: Lessons from Argentina’, Politics & Gender 4(3), 2008.

4. Beth Rein Gold and Kerry L. Haynie, ‘Representing Women’s Interests and Intersections of Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in US State Legislatures’, in Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon and Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson (eds.), Representation. Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 183-204.

5. ‘Parliaments’, as Rai and Spary paraphrase, ‘like other institutions, are gendered – in their rules as well as in the performance of these rules; in the norms they support, aesthetics they present, in their leadership, and the everyday dramaturgy’ (Rai and Johnson, 2014, p. 299).

6. Conciliation, compromise, and adjusting is a key script of many performances of womanhood [some refs]. As Goetz (1995, 12) summarizes, ‘to be a woman in an organization where most of one’s professional colleagues and hierarchical superiors are men, comes with a sense of “trespassing”, of not exactly belonging, because of one’s difference from the male norm’ – and this results in particular behaviours of women who professionally enter such spaces, and of their male colleagues. Anne Marie Goetz, ‘Women Development Workers: Implementing Rural Credit Programmes in Bangladesh’.

7. This observation is in line with other work on representation – e.g., Jensenius (parties clump marginalized people together due to electoral incentives, which has adverse effects on certain marginalized groups), Purohit (bureaucrats matter for politicians’ work and in particular ways for women sarpanches).

8. The crux of Brulé’s book, which I have not focused on here due to space constraints, is empirical: To test her gatekeeper theory, Brulé uses linear regression models and data from the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) dataset from 2006/9 covering rural households across 17 Indian states. She complements her quantitative analysis with an impressive 500 individual interviews across Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi. Her empirical findings are that across India, where there are reservations, women are more likely to inherit property and less likely to get a dowry. She also finds evidence of higher levels of intrahousehold violence, intrahousehold conflict between parents and children, and lower rates of married daughters living close to their natal households, for women who gain property after marriage. A striking finding is that exposure to quotas lowers the proportion of daughters that mothers bear by 5-20 percentage points, which Brulé conceptualizes as backlash to women’s representation, and hence a ‘paradox’ of gender-equalizing reform. Overall, Brulé presents a helpfully complex picture: female representation in gram panchayats both leads to the enforcement of gender-equalizing economic reforms but also has unexpected negative externalities.

9. At what point would they sell off ancestral land (would it be just before marriage, or would it be many years before?), or to choose a husband whose household is closer or further from her natal household (do young women get to exercise such voice in the marriage market if they negotiate? How prevalent do we expect this level and type of negotiation and choice to be?) As Brulé references from Chowdhry (1997), ‘The only ideal and izzatwala (honourable) pattern of inheritance is acknowledged to be by males from males. This means basically that daughters and sisters who are potential introducers of fresh blood and new descent lines through their husbands are to be kept from exercising their inheritance rights. With the result that the most virulent objection to the breach of caste/community taboos in marriage comes from the powerful landowning castes of the village” (quoted on p. 1025, Brulé 2020).

10. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Harvard University Press, 1987.

11. Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘Sex Equality Under the Constitution of India: Problems, Prospects, and ‘personal laws’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 4(2), 2006, pp. 181-202.

12. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, 2008.

13. These are key, as Alyssa Heinze’s (forthcoming) ethnography of women sarpanches in Maharashtrian gram panchayats shows.

14. R. Srivatsan. ‘Concept of “Seva” and the “Sevak in the Freedom Movement’, Economic and Political Weekly 41(5), 2006, pp. 427-38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4417766.

15. Tariq Thachil, ‘Embedded Mobilization: Nonstate Service Provision as Electoral Strategy in India’, World Politics 63(3), Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 434-69, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23018777.

16. Soundarya Chidambaram, ‘The “Right” Kind of Welfare in South India’s Urban Slums: Seva vs. Patronage and the Success of Hindu Nationalist Organizations’, Asian Survey 52(2), University of California Press, 2012, pp. 298-320. https://doi.org/10.1525/as.2012.52.2.298.

17. Swati Dyahadroy, ‘Exploring Gender, Hindutva and Seva’, Economic and Political Weekly 44(17), 2009, pp. 65-73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40279187.

18. Manuela Ciotti, ‘Resurrecting Seva (Social Service): Dalit and Low-Caste Women Party Activists as Producers and Consumers of Political Culture and Practice in Urban North India’, The Journal of Asian Studies 71(1), [Cambridge University Press, Association for Asian Studies], 2012, pp. 149-70, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41350057.