Nira Yuval-Davis' new book, Gender and Nation offers a comprehensive treatment of key issues which relate to gender,

nation, and nationalism. It is an insightful and highly readable theoretical work which incorporates the most recent literature on these issues. The author begins by making a few key points about gender and nationalism: firstly, that most of the major theoretical treatments of nationalism in the social sciences (eg. by Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm and Greenfeld) have not taken gender into account as part of the analysis, and have tended to emphasize hegemonic western nationalisms to the exclusion of non-western nationalisms; secondly, in light of the omission of a gender analysis in this literature, she points out that nationalisms are always gendered (although not always and everywhere in the same way). In making this point, she cites the works of Balibar, Chatterjee and Mosse as exceptions to the 'gender-blind theorizations of nationalisms' (p. 3). Finally, she states that 'nationalist projects' are sharply differentiated in her book from 'nation-states', and calls attention to the fact that different 'nations' can and do exist within, across, and above the entities of nation-states, and that they rarely have a direct correspondence with these entities. In the introduction of the book, Yuval-Davis provides an overview of recent theoretical literature on the topics of gender, nation, states and nationalism, and follows with chapters on the biological and cultural reproduction of the nation (in which women figure prominently); the issues of citizenship, military and wars, and ethnicity. She applies a gender analysis to each topic, while taking into account the different social positions of women in terms of class, race, ethnicity, culture and country. Indeed, the author stresses throughout the book the importance of avoiding the placement of women in an overarching category of 'woman', a practice which does not consider the significant differences among them. Moreover, in a critique of 'identity politics', YuvalDavis also warns of the fallacy of viewing groups (gender, race, ethnic, class, and so forth) as homogenous entities which tend to produce a specific type of 'representative' of the collectivity, and has the effect of essentializing and reifying the group in a way that denies different experiences and positionings within it. One example of this is a view of the 'nation' as a de facto masculine entity, a view which does not address the differential position of women within it, or subsumes it to the interests of the (male) nation. Another example she cites relates to differences among women: the case of elite women serving as "representatives" of women's interests - not only in terms of privileged western women speaking for all women, but also, of privileged women from less-developed nations speaking for all of the women in their countries. Having called attention to what may be taken as the insurmountable differences among women, the author devotes the last chapter to a discussion of the direction a feminist politics might take to work its way out of the 'postmodern' conundrum of particularized interests and unreconcilable differences - a situation which would seem to preclude any basis for a united women's struggle for equality. Her prescription is a call for a 'transversal' political strategy which highlights 'dialogue' among women in different social positions (including those within different 'identity blocs'). A dialogue of 'transversalism' she contends, is differentiated from both 'universalism'" and 'relativism', but is one which allows women the possibility for better understanding each other's specific oppressions.

This may then lead to coalitions and political efforts around single issues about which women with different memberships and identities can agree. While cautioning that this type of political strategy may not always work where differences in interests are too great, Yuval-Davis nevertheless believes that this may be the most fruitful strategy to move beyond the pitfalls of identity politics, while providing a means to recognize some common ground for political action among differently-situated women. In this way, the author offers a strategy worth considering amidst the seemingly impassable identity boundaries of postmodern existence. This volume would be a useful addition to either individual or combined courses on the topics of gender, nations and nationalism, race and ethnicity, and would be appropriate for upper-level undergraduate, and graduate courses alike. Paula Frederick Harvard University p.1: Most of the hegemonic theorizations about nations and nationalism (e.g. Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1990; Kedourie, 1993; Smith, 1986; 1995), even including, sometimes, those written by women (e.g. Greenfeld, 1992), have ignored gender relations as irrelevant. This is remarkable because a major school of nationalism scholars, the primordialists (Geertz, 1963; Shils, 1957; van den Berghe, 1979), have seen in nations a natural and universal phenomenon which is an automatic extension of kinship relations. And yet, when discussing issues of national production and reproduction, the literature on nationalism does not usually relate to women. Instead, it p. 2 relates to state bureaucrats or intellectuals. However, as this book elaborates, it is women and not (just?) the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically. Why, then, are women usually hidden in the various theorizations of the nationalist phenomena? Pateman (1988) and Grant (1991) offer explanations which might be relevant here. Carol Pateman studied the classical theories of the social contract which are widely influential and have laid the foundation for common sense understanding of western social and political order. These theories divide the sphere of civil society into public and private domains. Women (and the family) are located in the private domain, which is not seen as politically relevant. Pateman and other feminists have challenged the validity of this model and the public/private divide even within its own assumptions, and Pateman claims that the public realm cannot be fully understood in the absence of the private sphere, and, similarly, the meaning of the original contract is misinterpreted without both, mutually dependent halves of the story. Civil freedom depends on patriarchal right. (1988: 4)

As nationalism and nations have usually been discussed as part of the political sphere, the exclusion of women from that arena has affected their exclusion from that discourse as well. Following Pateman, Rebecca Grant (1991) has an interesting explanation why women were located outside the relevant political domain. She claims that the foundation theories of both Hobbes and Rousseau portray the transition from the imagined state of nature into orderly society exclusively in terms of what they assume to be natural male characteristics the aggressive nature of men (Hobbes) and the capacity for reason in men (in Rousseau). Women are not part of this process and are therefore excluded from the social and remain close to nature. Later theories followed these assumptions as given. P5. 3 questions of feminist literature: a) Why and how are women oppressed? Sex/Gender system; dichotomous construction of social spheres like public/private and nature/civilization b) Ontological basis of the differences between men and women: are these differences determined biologically, socially or by a combination of the two? c) reaction to ethnocentric and westocentric perspectives; differences among women and among men, and their effects upon generalized notions of gender relations. Ist pursued by black and other ethnic minority women Dichotomy of public/private esp. important in terms of issues of citizenship. This division is fictional to a great extent as well as both ethnic and gender specific, and often this division has been used to exclude women from freedom and rights (Philllips 1993: 63) Chatterjee (1990) claims that the line between the public and the private is a completely inadequate tool for analysing construction of civil societies in postcolonial nations and that a non-westocentric analysis of gender relations cannot assume the boundary between the public and private as a given. The other dichotomy is the nature/civilization divide. The identification of women with nature has been seen not only as the cause for their exclusion from the civilized public political domain (Grant, 1991), but also as the explanation of the fact that in all cultures women are less valued socially than men. Simone de Beauvoir argued that It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal: that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to the sex that kills. Woman identified with nature, man with culture. In bearing children women create new things naturally (reproduction), while men are free/forced to create new things culturally. Also, women more confined to the domestic sphere and rear children who are pre-social beings. Cultural products of human society ranked above the realm of the physical world, and every culture is aimed at controlling/transcending nature. So women end up with an inferior symbolic position. Specific western values of nature as inferior to culture should not be considered universal and shared by all societies. Also, the search for a universal original reason for the

subordination of women can detract attention from the historically specific ways in which gender relations are constructed in different societies and the ways they are reproduced. State and civil society Separate theories of the state needed. Analytically, as well as politically, the state has to be differentiated from the Civil Society (because men and women have differeential access to state power). Floya Anthias and Nira Y D define the state as A body of institutions which are centrally organized around the intentionality of control with a given apparatus of enforcement (judicial and repressive) at its command and basis...Different forms of the state will involve different relationships between the control/coercion twin which is the residing characteristic of the state. There has been a conflation between the dichotomy of state and civil society and that of public and private domains. In order to avoid a westocentric reading of states and societies, there is a need to differentiate between state institutions, as mentioned above, civil society institutions, and the domain of family and kinship relations. Civil society includes those institutions, collectivities, groupings and social agencies which lie outside the formal rubric of state parameters outlined but which both inform and are informed by them. This may include voluntary institutions controlling the production of signs and symbols as well as the economic market. The domain of the family includes social, economic and political networks and households which are organized around kinship or family relations. All three domains produce their own ideological contents and in different states would have differential access to economic and political resources. Ideology therefore does not reside in any of these spheres; nor are any of these spheres ever homogeneous, and different parts of the state can act in contrary ways to others and their effects on different ethnic, class, gender and other groupings in the society could be different.... These questions of correspondence, in political projects, of the different components and levels of the state, involve also the questions of what are the mechanisms by which these projects are being reproduced and/or changed; of how ste control can be delegated from one level to another; and, probably most importantly, of how sections and groupings from the domains of civil society and the family gain access to the states controlling and coercive powers. It is within this context that the relationships between nations and states, as well as between other forms of ethnic groupings and the state, have to be analysed a precondition to understanding the ways women affect and are being affected by these processes. We shall turn, therefore, to examine the notion of the nation as an ideological and political construct separate from that of the nation-state. Notion of the Nation Naturalized image of the nation ( defending the territorry and protecting women and children) an ethologist image based on the behaviour patterns of a pack of wolves. Also, the primordialist theoreticians of the nation hold nations not only as eternal and universal, but also constitute a natural extension of family and kinship relations. Family and kinship units in these constructions are based on natural sexual divisions of labour, in which men protect womenandchildren.

Against this naturalized image, Ben Andersons construction of the nation as an imagined community. Not eternal or universal entity, but specifically modern and a direct result of particular developments in European history. Nations could arise when technological innovations established print capitalism, when reading spread from the elies into the other classes and people started to read mass publications in their own languages rather than in the classical religious languages, thus establishing linguistic national imagined communities. But insofar as even membership is felt to be natural rather than chosen, the nation, like the family, can ask for sacrifices including the ultimate sacrifice of killing and being killed. Anthony Smith looks at the ethnic origins of nations. While agreeing with modernists that nationalism, both as an ideology and as a movement, is wholly a modern phenomenon, Smith argues that The modern nation in practice incorporates several features of pre-modern ethne and owes much to a general model of ethnicity which has survived in many areas until the dawn of the modern era. Smith claims that the specificity of ethnic collectivities is to be found in its myth-symbol complex which is very durable over time (although the specific meanings of the myths and symbols can change), rather than in any social, economic or political features of te collectivity. Sami Zubaida, in criticizing this approach, has anchored the durability of ethnicities in certain socio-economic and political processes. He claims, by using examples from the histories of both Europe and the middle east, that ethnic homogeneity is not a cause but rather a long history of centralized governments which created a national unity in the premodern era. It was not given but was achieved precisely by the political processes which facilitated centralization. Also civic nationalism versus ethnic nationalism, roughly corresponding to good and bad kinds of nationalism. Yuval Davis differentiates between 3 major constructions of nationalist projects: 1) genealogical dimension which is constructed around the specific origin of the people or the race (Volknation). Myth of common origin (based on shared blood or genes) gives rise to exclusionary/ homogeneous visions of the nation. 2) Cultural dimension, in which the language and/or religion and/or other customs and traditions is constructed as the essence of the nation (Kulturnation). Tends to have little tolerance of non-organic diversity, although it allows for greater assimilation. 3) The civic dimension of nationalist projects focuses on citizenship (Staatsnation) as determining the boundaries of the nation, and thus relates it directly to notions of state sovereignty and specific terriroriality. Nationed gender and gendered nations 1) Women and the biological reproduction of the nation: Control of marriage, procreation, and therefore, sexuality; fear of miscegenation (one drop of blood of an inferior race would contaminate and pollute that of the superior race) 2) Cultural reproduction and gender relations: Symbolic border-guards (Armstrong, 1982) to differentiate between us and them. Identifying members and non-members of a cultural community, closely linked to specific cultural codes or styles of dress

and behaviour, as well as to more elaborate bodies of custom, religion, literary and artistic forms of production, and, of course, language. Gender symbols play a particularly significant role, constructing women as symbolic border guards and as embodiments of a particular collectivity, while at the same time being its cultural reproducers. Discourse and struggles around the issues of womens emancipation or women following tradition (campaigns for and against womens voting, veiling, education and employment); also their subjectivities, and their relations to each other as well as to men and children. 3) Citizenship and difference:

Nira Yuval-Davis' Paper

[c]

'Human security' and the Gendered Politics of Belonging

Introduction In recent years, with growing realization of both the achievements and the limitations of identity politics, especially under the growing costs of neo-liberal globalisation in terms of inequities, there have been more and more attempts to interrelate what Nancy Fraser (1997) has called the political problematics and the dilemmas of justice of recognition and redistribution in the 'postsocialist' condition. In other words, how to incorporate the demands of people as collective agents for recognition of their separate identity and culture with a more traditional socialist concern with the redistribution of wealth in compensation of class inequities.

While Nancy Fraser has been working in the arena of feminist and political theory, activists and NGO workers in the international and development arenas have been trying to tackle the same issues under somewhat different terminologies. Two central, different but interrelated 'buzz-words' in this field have been 'intersectionality' and 'human security'. Elsewhere I've written and commented on the debate concerning the first term (Yuval-Davis, 2003; see also Anthias & Yuval-Davis 1983, 1992). In this paper I want to focus on the notion of 'human security' and how it relates to the Fraser dilemma. However, while Nancy Fraser mainly tackles the issues from within the realms of morality and politics, I would like to add to them also the realm of the emotional. Feminists have been arguing against the use of the emotional as

means of excluding them from political participation (Nussbaum, 1995). They also strongly emphasize the socially constructed nature of the emotional (Ahmed, 2000; Chodorow, 1978; Nussbaum, ibid). However, inspite of Anderson's crucial work on this in the arena of nationalism (1991(1983); see also Kitching, 1985), there has not been enough work done to incorporate the emotional as a central part of the political process itself within the current debates. This ommission is especially problematic because a lot of the gains of the Extreme Right and more and more of the mainstream, both in Europe and outisde it, is due to their appropriation of the emotional, while the Left all too often escludes it as an inappropriate basis for the political. The debate around the notion of 'human security' which is discussed in this paper constitutes an attempt to deal with this omission.
The first part of the paper introduces the notion of 'human security' that has become a trendy mantra to many of the international NGOs and UN circuit during the last few years. I then turn to look at the relationship of this notion with wider issues that concern contemporary politics of belonging. The last part of the paper focuses on some particular issues that this relationship poses for specific feminist concerns. 'Human security' 'Human security' is a buzzword that many activists, including feminists, started to carry around as a substitute to the notion of 'human rights' in recent years. A product of the postcold-war era, it has gained special resonance especially with the growing security mania of post 9-11. However, the notion of 'human security' relates to concerns that have been growing since before that. Some of these concerns relate to the field of military security. There are claims that 'human security' represents 'the cardinal mission' of the United Nations (the International Commission on Intervention and Sovereignty, mentioned in Alkire, 2002;4). It has grown from the UN's 'agenda for peace' (A/47/277-S/24111) and reflects the growing move of security concerns from inter-state to intra-state concerns and from national territories to ethnocized and racialized communities, local and trans-national. However, the agenda of 'human security' as it developed has become much more radical and encompassing than that, partly pushed by the growing participation of NGOs and the growing sophistication of Peace and Conflict Studies. It also reflected the growing unease not only with the spread of ethnic conflicts and wars but also with the growing poverty and inequity under neo-liberal globalised market. As the 1994 UNDP report stated, 'human security' is 'articulating a preventive "people-centered" approach that focused jointly on "freedom from fear and freedom from want"' (Alkire:4). Or, to use Kofi Annan, the UN general secretary's more detailed declaration: ''human security' can no longer be understood in purely military terms. Rather, it must encompass economic development, social justice, environmental protection, democratization, disarmament and respect for human rights and the rule of law.' (UN Millenium Report,2000:43-44). The field of 'human security' has thus incorporated critiques and concerns not only from the

arena of international relations but also from the field of development. In particular it has been influenced by the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen (1981, 1992) and later on by Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum & Sen, 1993; Nussbaum, 2000). This approach rejects the discourse of rights and entitlements as well as of general measures of opulence, such as GNP per capita, and instead focuses on the ways people positioned in all groups in society are capable to achieve quality of life in terms of achievement and freedom. It argues that resources have no value in themselves apart from their role in promoting human functioning. Marta Nussbaum claims (1995b:5) that the capabilities approach is compatible with cultural relativism - the supposed lack of which has been a major source of critique of the 'human rights' discourse - (although not necessarily with subjective preferences, as they 'may be deformed on various ways by oppression and deprivation'). Its main focus, however, has been to develop a list of universal functions of human beings that are most worth the care and attention of public planning the world over. The link between the 'capabilities' approach and the 'human security' approach is not only ideological but also personal. Amartya Sen himself has adopted the mantra of 'human security' (2000) and has been a major inspirational figure in this field. Specifically in relation to feminist concerns in the field of development, the notions of 'human security' has attempted to answer critiques to the various paradigms of WID (Women In Development), WAD (Women And Development) and GAD (Gender And Development) (Bhanvnani, Foran & Kurian, 2003), avoid Eurocentrism and tackle questions of specific cultural constructions. It is because of this transformative meaning that 'human security' has primarily become incorporated as such into feminist discourse, as in the work of such organizations such as AWID, DAWN & IAMWGE (see papers presented at the 2002 AWID conference [www.awid.org]; for somewhat similar analyses see also Bhavnani & al 2003). However, the 'human security' approach tackles a wider range of issues than most paradigms of gender and development,. There is only partial agreement concerning what constitutes 'human security' and what are the issues that need to be tackled to achieve it. Different scholars, activists and agencies have defined 'human security' in somewhat different terms. The Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research compiled a list of more than twenty different definitions of 'human security' by various UN, government and academic institutions and scholars (see their website). However, although they have much in common, they often do not specify exactly what rights, capabilities and/or needs are covered by the notion of 'human security'. Sabina Alkire, who prepared a conceptual framework for 'human security' for the international 'Commission on Human Security' (2002) argues that a working definition of 'human security' should do no more than identify a certain 'vital core' to be protected from 'critical pervasive threats in a way that is consistent with long-term human fulfilment'. She identifies three categories of rights and freedoms in this 'vital core' of 'human security' - those pertaining to survival, to livelihood and to basic dignity. Beyond this, she claims, the definition should not be more specific, as 'the task of prioritizing among rights and capabilities, each of which is argued by some to be fundamental, is a value judgement and a difficult one which maybe best undertaken by appropriate institutions' and wide-ranging public participation. Alkire's approach follows that of

Amartya Sen (2000) in the 'International Symposium on 'human security' in Tokyo in July 2000, who adopted these three categories as the core of 'human security' and discussed in his paper the new threats to each of them in contemporary global context. Others, like Lincoln Chen (1995) and Graham & Poku (2000) include freedom and liberation as a central part of the vital core of 'human security'. Although Sadako Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees (1999) talks about 'human security' as guaranteeing to all people all the rights 'that belonging to a State implies' the right to/notion of belonging as such, to a national or ethnic community, is not referred to explicitly in any of the various definitions of 'human security' I have seen. And yet the relationships between individuals and communities is central to the discourse of 'human security'. One can see this whenever the notion of human dignity is associated with the rights of people to exercise solidarity (eg Sen, 2000) or practice their cultures (eg Ogata, 1999) and whenever their right for 'human security' is linked with their rights for a sustainable sense of home and social networks (Leaning & al. 2000). Probably most significantly, in the various definitions and discussion on 'human security', the carriers of rights are sometimes constructed not just as human individuals but also as 'their communities' (Alkire, 2002:2). There is no interrogation, however, as to how these relations of ownership between certain individuals and specific collectivities have been constructed and what are the boundaries of these 'imagined communities' (Anderson, 1991[1983]). And yet, civil wars and ethnic strife are considered to be major threats to 'human security' as are the more general questions of racism and social exclusion. It is in this intersection of the various constructions of 'human security' and the gendered needs and/or rights of people to belong to particular collectivities and communities and to defend them when they consider their communities to be under threat, that the focus of this paper lies. The politics of belonging My interest in the politics of belonging has been developing out of my work on identity politics on the one hand and multi-layered citizenships (of local, ethnic, trans- as well as national and supra-national polities) on the other hand (eg Yuval-Davis, 1994, 1997, 1999). Belonging, however, as Crowley argues (1999:22), is a 'thicker' concept than that of citizenship. It is not just about membership, rights and duties, but also about the emotions that such memberships evoke. Nor can belonging be reduced to identities and identifications, which are about individual and collective narratives of self and others, presentation and labeling, myths of origin and myths of destiny. Belonging, arguably, is a deep emotional need of people, formatted during infancy and/or even during the times inhabited already in the womb (Otto Rank, 1973 [1929]; Bowlby, 1969,1973; Chodorow, 1978). Countless psychological, and even more psychoanalytical, works have been dedicated to writings about the fears of separation of the babies from the womb, from the mother, from the familiar. It is important to emphasize that this need to belong and fear of separation that are interrelated, exist even in cases of sexual and other

abuse in the family, and even when the environment of the womb itself proves to be far from the perfect haven in which all the needs of the baby are being satisfied (Lake, 1986(1966)). Belonging and the yearning to belong, however, have not only been central in psychological discourse, and personal and familial attachments have not been their only objectives. In some way, one could claim that one of the prime concerns of sociological theory since its establishment and hence its writings, has been the differential ways people belong to collectivities and states - as well as the social, economic, and political effects of instances of the displacement of such belongings as a result of industrialisation and/or migration. Some basic classical examples are Toennies' distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1940[1935]), Durkheim's division of mechanical and organic solidarity (1933) or Marx' notion of alienation (1975[1844]). Anthony Giddens (1991) has argued that during modernity, people's sense of belonging becomes reflexive and Manuel Castells (1996-8) claims that contemporary society has become the 'network society' in which effective belonging has moved from civil societies of nations and states into reconstructed defensive identity communities. Interestingly, in many of these texts, the conditions which bring to the lessening of naturalized belongings also bring growing social inequities. They also bring about 'the risk society' (Beck, 1992[1986]), in which fear invade more and more spheres of life. Neither citizenship nor identity can encapsulate the notion of belonging. Belonging is where the sociology of emotions interfaces with the sociology of power, where identification and participation collude, or are at least aspired to or yearned for. Like other hegemonic constructions, belonging tends to become 'naturalized' and thus invisible in hegemonic formations. It is only when one's safe and stable connection to the collectivity, the homeland, the state, becomes threatened, that it becomes articulated and reflexive rather than just performative. It is then that individual, collective and institutional narratives of belonging become politicised. And as mentioned in the introduction, it is often the Right that exploits the love and hate, fears and hopes that are evoked in these situations in order to build higher walls around the boundaries and borders of the national collectivity and to mobilize the people towards exclusionary politics, often relying on narratives of fear and threats to security. Paradoxically these kinds of politics often have the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading further and further away from a social, economic and political climate, in which any notion of 'human security' can happen. Women, 'human security' and the gendered politics of belonging The relationships between 'human security' and the politics of belonging are deeply gendered and paradoxical in more ways than one. As Anderson (1991[1983]; see also Kitching, 1985) pointed out, there are very few causes for which people - and it is usually men - are ready to sacrifice their lives as well as to kill, as in the cause of their imagined communities of belonging. In the name of communal security, real and/or imagined, they are prepared to sacrifice their personal security.

The inherent paradox in women's politics of belonging is somewhat different, and relates to the different relationships that women usually have occupied in ethnic and national collectivities. On the one hand, women belong and are identified as members of the collectivity in the same way that men are. Nevertheless, there are always rules and regulations - not to mention perceptions and attitudes - specific to women. Such constructions involve a paradoxical positioning of women as both symbols and 'others' of the collectivity. On the one hand women are seen as signifiers of the collectivity's honour ((Yuval-Davis & Anthias, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1997), in the defense of which nations go to war ('for the sake of womenandchildren' to use Cynthia Enloe's term (1990) ). At the same time they are a non-identical element within the collectivity and subject to various forms of control in the name of 'culture and tradition'. As I have elaborated elsewhere (Yuval-Davis, 1997; Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler, 2002), this constructs women as embodiments of collectivity boundaries but at the same time might make it easier for women to transcend and cross boundaries and engage in dialogical transversal politics (Cockburn & Hunter, 1999; Yuval-Davis 1994, 1997, forthcoming). Such politics acknowledge and respect the different positionings of women from the different collectivities but operate within the boundaries of the common 'epistemic community' (Assiter,1996) of emancipatory values. This is especially true in recent times. Under the technological, economic and political conditions of globalisation, a certain loosening of some of the controls of traditional values, structures and leaderships has taken place and some of the hegemonic constructions of borders and boundaries have become more permeable. This means that many women are able now to embark on new social roles, both in the civil and the military labor markets as well as to cross and transcend many other social and political boundaries. Nevertheless, globalisation has not only been the occasion of the loosening of the bonds of belonging. It has also been the context for the rise and vitality of defensive ethnic and religious fundamentalist movements in the North and in the South in which agendas control of women and their behavior often play central roles (Sahgal & Yuval-Davis, 1992; YuvalDavis, 1997). This might make women, especially those who do not conform, highly vulnerable. This points to another paradox which concerns the relationship for women between belonging and security, where often the danger for women's security lies where her bonds of belonging lie as well. Feminists have always been pre-occupied with 'the enemy within'. They have pointed out that it is often the woman's nearest and dearest who are the most violent towards her and long before the days of the 'global war on terrorism' have looked for ways to make women feel secure wherever they are, whether at home or outside at work, to reclaim the street as a safe space as well as all other private and public spaces (eg Bunch, 1997; Lees, 1997). However, while this pre-occupation with women's safety and security has constituted a major part of feminist politics, it has always been only part of feminist politics that also called for a thorough transformation of the relations of gender and sexuality within the family and within society as a whole. To borrow from the differentiation made by 'Aunt Lydia' in Margaret's Atwood's book The Handmaid's Tale (Vintage, 1990; see also the introduction to Sahgal & Yuval-Davis, 1992), feminist politics have always included both the notion of 'freedom of' as well as that of 'freedom from'.

However, it is much easier for people to perceive and sympathize with the idea of negative freedom rather than that of a positive one and often demands for women's safety got more sympathetic ear than those which called for radical transformation of social relations that are necessary for this to happen . Moreover, as Charlotte Bunch (2002) has commented, even within such constructions of negative freedom and 'human security', the physical security risks for women from violent men of whatever nationality, race and religion have been marginalized, if not completely ignored within the overall global concern with security (except, I would add, when the call to protect and/or liberate women was useful as a rallying cry for war - as, for example, happened in the case of the recent war in Afghanistan and to a lesser extent, on Iraq) .

A concluding comment
This marginalization of the security needs of women bring us back to the dyad of recognition/redistribution with which the paper started, because, of course, it is not only the security needs of women that are marginalized but also their other needs and resources. As Nancy Fraser would point out, this is a case par excellence in which lack of recognition affects lack of redistribution. Sara Ahmed (2000) is trying to develop what she calls 'economies of emotions', arguing that what characterises emotions is that they circulate without inhabiting any particular object, body or sign, without inherent source or goal, although one effect of the circulation might be that some objects, bodies or signs are endowed with emotional meaning and values, 'they can get stuck'. Ahmed argues that the intensification of emotions that take place when they 'get stuck' is what creates the surface, the boundary of difference. I find some aspects of Ahmed's approach problematic, especially the fact that the notion of the economies of emotions and their circulation constructs a marketing model, as if emotions not only circulate and get attached but also get traded as a matter of course. Nonetheless, her approach might be one way of the incorporation of the emotional into the political and the economical, into the interface of the sociology of emotions with the sociology of power relations, into the interweaving of 'freedom from fear' with the 'freedom from want'. What is most important, however, is that we cannot leave the emotional outside our considerations and our theorizations of social justice and equity.

REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara, (2000), 'Communities that feel: Intensity, Difference an Attachment' in Anu Koivunen & Susanna Paasonen (eds) Conference proceedings for Affective Encounters, Rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies, e-book published by Media Studies, Turku: 10-24 [http://www.utu.fi/hum/mediatutkimus/affective/proceedings.pdf] Alkire, Sabina (2002), 'Working Definition' and 'Executive Summary' from Conceptual Framework for 'human security', http://www.humansecurity-chs.org/doc/frame.pdf.

Andrson, Ben (1991[1983]), Imagined Communities, London: Verso

Anthias, Floya & Yuval-Davis, Nira (1983), "Contextualising Feminism: Gender, Ethnic & Class divisions", Feminist Review, No 15, November 1983:62-75. Anthias; Floya & Yuval-Davis, Nira (1992), Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle, London: Routledge
Assiter, Alison (1996), Enlightened Women: Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age, London: Routledge Beck, Ulrich (1992(1986), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications Bhavnani, Kum-Kum, Foran, John & Kurian, Priya (eds), (2003), Feminist Futures: ReImagining Women, Culture and Development, London: Zed Books Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment , Vol. 1 of Attachment and Loss. London: Hogarth Press. New York: Basic Books Bunch, Charlotte (1997), The Intolerable Status Quo: Violence Against Women and Children, NY: UNICEF Bunch, Charlotte (2002), panel discussion on Women and 'human security', AWID conference, November Castells, Manuel (1996-8), The Information Age: Economy, Society, Culture, 3 vols, Oxford: Blackwell Chen, Lincoln (1995), ''human security': Concepts and Approaches' in T. Matsumae & L.C. Chen (eds). Common Security in Asia: New Concepts of 'Human Security' , Tokyo: Tokai University Press Chodorow, Nancy (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkley: University of California Press Cockburn, Cynthia & Hunterm Lynette (eds) (1999) Transversal Politics, special issue of Soundings, summer, no.12 Crowley, John (1999), 'The politics of belonging: some theoretical consideration' in A. Geddes & A. Favell (eds.), The Politics of Belonging: Migrants and Minorities in

Contemporary Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 15-41 Durkheim, Emile (1933), The Division of Labor In Society, NY: The Free Press Enloe, Cynthia (1990), 'Womenandchildren: making feminist sense of the Persian Gulf Crisis', The Village Voice, 25 September Fraser, Nancy (1997), Justice Interruptus: Critical reflections on the 'Postsocialist' condition, NY: Routledge Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and Self Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press Graham, David T. & Poku, Nana K. (2000), Migration, Globalisation and 'human security', London: Routledge Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, 'Definitions of 'human security', (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hpcr/events/hsworkshop/list_definitions.pdf) Kitching, Gavin (1985), 'Nationalism: the instrumental passion', Capital and Class, no. 25:98-116 Lake, Frank (1986 [1966]), Clinical Theology, London: Darton, Longman & Todd Leaning, Jennifer, M.D., S.M.H. & Arie, Sam, (2000), '"human security" in Crisis and Transition: A Background Document of Definition and Application', Working Draft prepared for US AID/ Tulane CERTI, September Lees, Sue (1997), Ruling Passons: Sexual Violence and the Law, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press Marx, Karl (1975[1844]), Early Writings, Hammondsworth, Penguin Books McClintock, Anne (1993), 'Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and The Family', Feminist Review, 44:61-80 Nussbaum. Martha & Sen, Amartya (eds.) (1993), The Quality of Life, Oxford: Oxford University press Nussbaum, Martha (1995a), 'Emotions and Women's Capabilities', in M. Nussbaum & J. Glover (eds), Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 360-395 Nussbaum, Martha (1995b), 'Introduction', in M. Nussbaum & J. Glover (eds), Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, pp. 1-36 Nussbaum, Martha (2000), Women and Human Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University press Ogata, Sadako, (1999), '"human security": A Refugee Perspective', Keynote Speech at the Ministeral Meeting on 'human security' Issues of the 'Lysoen Process' Group of Governments, Bergen Norway, May (http://www.unhcr.ch/refworld/unhcr/hcspeech/990519.htm) Rank, Otto, (1973[1929]), The Trauma of Birth, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Sahgal, Gita & Yuval-Davis, Nira (eds.),(1992) Refusing Holy Orders: Women and Fundamentalism in Britain, London: Virago Sen, Amartya (1981), Poverty and Famine, Oxford: Clarence press Sen, Amartya, (1992) Inequality Re-examined, Oxford: Clarence Press Sen, Amartya. (2000) "Why 'human security'." Presentation at the International Symposium on 'human security', hosted by the Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Takanawa Prince Hotel, Tokyo, July Available online at http://www.humansecuritychs.org/doc/Sen2000.pdf Tonnies, Ferdinand (1940[1935]) Fundamental Concepts of Sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), New York: American Book Company [English translation of the 1935 German edition] United Nations Millennium Report, (2000), http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/full.htm Yuval-Davis, Nira & Anthias, Floya (eds) (1989), Woman - Nation - State, London: Macmillan Yuval-Davis, Nira (1994), 'Women, Ethnicity & Empowerment', Feminism and Psychology, vol.4(1):179-198 Yuval-Davis, Nira (1997), Gender & Nation, London & NY: Sage Yuval-Davis & Stoetzler, Marcel (2002), 'Imagined Boundaries & Borders: A Gendered Gaze', European Journal of Women's Studies vol 9(3):329-344 Yuval-Davis, Nira (2003), 'Intersectionality: A recurrent feminist debate', paper presented at the ESRC seminar series COMPLETE, Warwick Univewrsity, March

Yuval-Davis, Nira (forthcoming), 'Transversal Politics and the situated imagination', International Feminist Journal of Politics

Rolando B. Tolentino,

National/Transnational Subject Formation and Media In and On the Philippines

Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001. 971-550-382-9, pp. 205.

reviewed by Mina Roces

A collection of nine separate essays, this book by Rolando Tolentino works successfully as a monograph as common themes weave in and out of the excellent chapters. The essays are mostly about films (documentaries and feature films) but there is one essay on the discourse of Filipina 'mail-order brides' in the United States and Australia. The titles of the various chapters describe the topics well: 'Filipinas in Transnational Space'; 'Inangbayan in Lino Brocka's Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (1985) and Orapronobis (1989)'; 'Issues of the 'Filipino/a' in Asia-Pacific American Media Arts'; 'Nations, Nationalisms, and Los timos de Filipinas'; 'Kidlat Tahimik in the Rhetoric of First World Theory'; 'Subjectivity and Nation in Filipino Autobiographical Documentaries'; 'Archipelagic Space and Southeast Asian Cinemas'; 'Geopolitical Space and the Chinese 'City' Films'; and 'Subcontracting Imagination and Imageries of Bodies and Nations'. One dominant theme raised by many of the essays is the nation as gendered subject in both national and transnational spaces. Whether in the 'mail-order bride' discourses in the internet or print media, or in feature films and documentaries made in the Philippines and abroad, 'the Philippines' was feminised and used as a foil to the masculinisation of the West or the colonial or even former colonial power. Tolentino demonstrated how the 'mail-order bride' discourse reproduced the colonial orientalist discourse where the Filipina is imagined as a woman 'saved' from the economic malaise by a white male husband:
The mail-order bride functions as a commodity embodying the recently outdated First World narratives of the nuclear family and coloniality. On the one hand, in the exchange of marriage proposals and bodies through the previous technology of the postal system, the Third World woman assumes the domestic and sexual tasks vacated by emancipated white women. On the other hand, the Third World woman is rescued from oppressors native men and povertyin her native land. The nuclear family and colonialist fantasies are entwined in the operation of the catalogs (p. 16).

These findings resonate with the anthropological and oral history material on the topic of 'mailorder brides' in Australia and Live-in Care Givers in Canada who marry their employers. While there are a number of studies that explore the discourses of 'mail-order brides' in Australia, Tolentino adds new material and new insights as he analyses primary sources such as catalogs,

films, and internet sites. Both the essay on 'Filipinas in Transnational Spaces' and the essay on the Spanish popular film Los ltimos de Filipinas about the Spanish army's last stand in Baler, interpret the feminisation of the Philippine nation in the context of Western (American, Australian or Spanish) feelings of 'colonial nostalgia'. As mentioned, the discourse on the 'mail-order brides' is premised on the attitude that a white husband will 'save' the Filipina from economic hardship or a life of prostitution. Tolentino explains the Spanish film's popularity in Spain due to its conflation of imperialist desire and colonialist nostalgia (p. 88). Though the movie is set in 1898 'where nationalist historians mark the moment as the founding of "Asia's first republic"' (p. 88), in the dramatisation of the resistance put up by fifty Spanish soldiers 'Spanish national masculinity was regained for 1945 audiences through the valorization of the heroism of its colonial past' (p. 98). The Philippines is represented as 'an unruly woman, a trope that justified the use of rape and violence in the pursuit of "manifest destiny", "benevolent assimilation", and the "white man's burden". Pacification of the female nation-space instigated the very same processes of nostalgia, destruction, then mourning' (p. 98). By mythologising Spain's last stand not as defeat but as bravery, Spain rediscovers its masculinity in post-1945. The connection between gender and empire is also made by Kristin Hoganson's work on American masculinity and the Spanish-American War. [1] Tolentino shows how a masculinity 'lost' from a lost empire could be 'rediscovered' through a mythologising of an empire's bravery in defeat. Tolentino also uses this case study to make a contribution to Benedict Andersons' theory of nation as imagined community[2] by exploring how film has taken over print media in the technology used to imagine the nation (p. 89). The image of the Philippine nation as 'mother' or the image of the Inangbayan (mother/nation) (I would extend the definition to include the 'suffering mother/nation because the mother/nation is always imagined as suffering) is explored very well through the analysis of two films by Lino Brocka. This is a very welcome essay particularly for specialists on gender politics in the Philippines because the image of Inangbayan is a very powerful and emotive one. Tolentino's critique of the films, including Brocka's racialising of the Chinese ethnic group in the Philippines (especially at the historical junctures depicted in the films) shows a sensitive and thorough reading of Brocka's film text. Tolentino's analysis throughout the book is consistently sophisticated, 'spot-on', and full of insights on Filipino national and transnational cultures. The analysis of discourse is very well integrated with political histories and political positioning of Filipinos in the United States (as becoming the largest Asian migrant population but with no collective agency) and in the global or transnational era. The essays on the Spanish film Los ltimos de Filipinas, and the documentaries by FilipinoAmericans break new ground and deal with new topics not yet analysed by scholars. There are a couple of essays that also explore the Asia-Pacific region through films. Most of the essays attest to the ongoing urgency of the Filipino quest for identity whether in Philippine or transnational spaces with a fresh look at how the Filipino as transnational subject adds to this ongoing debate. The latter is a particularly relevant and important issue to raise. Given the growing number of Filipinos in transnational spaces, and given Tolentino's valid point that the transnational Filipino is closely connected to the 'homeland', contemporary discussions on the 'Filipino' need to include both the national and transnational gendered subject.

The first essay will interest the many scholars writing on Filipinos overseas as migrants for marriage or as domestic helpers and entertainers. Although the rest of the essays on film appeal directly to the specialist audience of film and literary critics, those interested in the gendering of nation in popular discourse will find the essays very enlightening. Endnotes
[1] Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. [2] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983, 1991. FROM GENDER TO NATION: Rada Ivekovic, Julie Mostov Editors; Pub. by Zubaan, an associate of Kali for Women, K-92, I Floor, Hauz Khas Enclave, New Delhi-110016. Rs. 350. THIS IS a book long overdue and could not have come at a better time. The editors in particular and the authors of different papers in the book have in several ways tried to grapple with two important identity constructions, that of gender and of nation-building. The book not only brings out very ably the manner in which the relationship between gender and nationbuilding is constructed but, more important, it underscores very emphatically the point that the problem of patriarchy cannot be solved without undermining the constitution of the nation. The central argument of the editors (articulated in different ways by other authors) is that, "maintaining patriarchy is not only the wilful activity of (some) men" but that "a gender sensitive analysis of the mechanism of nation and state building is also an analysis of the mechanism of patriarchy." The two processes are however not identical, they move at different speeds; worse, since, very often they are not transparent to each other they end up clashing with one another. Feminist critiques of the nation offered in the book provide far-reaching analyses of the relationships of power involved in the state and nation-building projects; these critiques simultaneously lay bare the fact that, if and when, the nation is no longer able to rely on the hierarchy of gender, "its identity and claim for continuity will be shattered, and with it, a powerful form of domination." The collection of articles in the book is based largely on the emerging and still evolving "nations" following the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Three other articles deal with India, two reflecting on the Partition, while the third analyses the continued attempts to define and redefine the national and the international while keeping intact the essence of "Indian culture" an exercise that "neither addresses the well being of people, nor is determined `within' the nation, but is increasingly a transnational production that is gendered on both counts the national and the transnational." The introduction provides a brilliant thematic discussion of the several ways in which the central argument of the book is articulated by the different authors. For example, the editors point out how "borders" become significant in the gendering of boundaries and spaces and in the collectivising of "our women" and "their women". Women's bodies serve as symbols of the fecundity of the nation and vessels for its reproduction as well as territorial markers. As markers and as property, women, as mothers, daughters and wives, require

protection of patriotic sons. Thus fantasised, it becomes easy to reinforce sexual imagery and stereotypes the feminine is passive and the masculine active. The Motherland provides a passive, receptive and vulnerable image in contrast to the active image of the Fatherland, which is the force behind government and military action invasion, conquest and defence. In the same vein, while "our women" are to be revered as mothers (and therefore all women's bodies need to be controlled), the "other's women" are enemies as reproducers, multiplying the number of outsiders and therefore conspiring to destroy "our nation" by their numerous offsprings. The book offers a rich, but not often lucid, ethno-national discussion of how women can recover and create emancipatory practices by moving away "from history as fatality to history as possibility, from hierarchical community to complex, diverse society." But this agenda is premised on our understanding and investigation of how nation-states have constituted exclusive national identities through gendered representations, hierarchies and narratives. The interchangeable use of the terms "feminist critique" and "gender analysis" throughout the book, however, is problematic. In the particular context of the book, creating a nation that is gender equal is not just enough but not good at all since the underlying role model for the female is still the male; on the contrary, we need a feminist agenda that is aimed not merely at assimilating but one that can create a world that is worth assimilating into. PADMINI SWAMINATHAN Printer friendly page Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives

By Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat, Social Text Collective

Cross-Gendering the Racial Memory

The Gigantic Feminine as Double-Crossing American (Black) Nationalist History Marlon B. Ross When Ernest Gaines chooses a woman as the individual subject for collective memorialization and the ideal medium of racial memory in his 1971 novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he participates in a significant but overlooked genre of black masculine discourse, the composition of black authorship as historical/national authority through the voice and viewpoint of a female protagonist. This cross-gendering of the racial imaginary, introjecting a male vision of racial collectivity and history through a

females frame of reference, though not exactly a form of cross-dressing, can be usefully analyzed as such. Erecting a feminine monument to emblematize and materialize highly abstract notions like nationhood, justice, peace, warfare, virtue, democracy, pro/creativity, and truth has a long history in many cultures across the globe. It is a long-standing practice within many patriarchal cultures, in other words, to project highly abstract masculine visions of established power onto a female form, draped in feminine attire. Whether this occurs metaphorically, as in the case of gendering the nation-state as feminine (Britannia for the United Kingdom, Columbia for the United States, St. Joan for France, etc.), or through more literal iconography, such as the Statue of Liberty, the feminine form serves to purify, emblematize, and collectivizeand thus to transcendentalizeconcepts of rightful dis/empowerment that are otherwise fraught with cultural-historical strife. The static nature of such imagery distances us from the contentiousness of the act of cross-gendering that occurs ideologically in the enunciation or re-erection of patriarchal power through an objectified, if celebrated, feminine icon. We can find evidence of this conventionally patriarchal kind of feminine iconography in black cultural practice. For instance, in black nationalist discourse of the 1960s and 70s (whether in the Black Power movement in the United States or the post-colonial movements in the West Indies and Africa), there is a tendency to emblematize the rising black nation as a fecund black mother, frequently figured more transcendently as Mother Africa herself, even as the battle for and leadership of these emerging nations is assumed to be the purview of militant big men. Ironically, to index the greatness of the emerging nation, and the bigness of the male freedom fighters and founders, both figuratively and materially the female icon must be giganticized, making her a presence so massive as to become a queer she-malemasculine in size and intent, feminine in spirit and form. In European-American iconography, there is a drive to materialize this gigantic feminine figure not only by super-sizing her but also by casting her in the hardest stonesagain the Statue of Liberty providing a perfect instance. Lacking the economic resources for such a luxury of patriarchal imagination, black nationalist practice most frequently resorts to more figurative embodiments of the gigantic feminine in art, poetry, song, and dance. Gainess gigantic female who voices and embodies black American epochal and epical history, Miss Jane Pittman, is cast as novel and film (1974) at the height of the black nationalist moment, when metaphorical she/males emblematizing the masculine heroism of black nation-building are proliferating all over the place in black popular culture. This paper analyzes Miss Jane Pittman in this historical context of the black nationalist gigantic female icon. I argue that while Gaines draws on this black nationalist image as context and subtext, he diverts attention away from this militant and often violent black nationalist iconography of cross-gendering to figure instead a strong, enduring black woman as a pacifying emblem of cross-racial American nation-building. Opting to follow the lead of other black male cross-gendering writersmost notably James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, and Wallace ThurmanGaines erects Miss Jane as a she/male icon who prophesies the integrated, interracial, harmonious United States nation that emerges ironically out of black folks capacity to endure and transcend an entrenched history of state-endorsed racial violence and abjection. Gaines chooses a woman as his medium/subject both to envelope the image of the gigantic black feminine as black

nationalist icon and to counter that image in favor of a conscientious black nation within a bloody white nation, the black (wo)man as the purifying conscience of the historically compromised American nation-state. On the one hand, Gainess iconography has the benefit of disturbing and subverting the normatively masculine stance of black nationalism by figuring a she/male whose cross-gendering is less aggressively patriarchal in size and intent, more ambivalently feminine in spirit and form. On the other hand, it has the effect of softening and thus blunting the militant agency of a defiant black collective conscience and consciousness.

I
1The nation is a woman. This is true in the sense that in many languages the nation, as an abstract entity, is inflected in the feminine gender. Far from being merely a linguistic fluke, this persistent gendering of the nation in language codifies an ideology of the nations femininity. As a speech act, making a woman of the nation is a linguistic trick. Everything we know about the nation-state, nationalist ideology and identity, and the violence of the nationalist imperative proves that, as far as realpolitik is concerned, the nation is the contrary of the feminine. Thus, this linguistic trick works to camouflage the extent to which the nationas material, political, economic, social creatureis an embattled, bloodsoaked territory whose protection and profit have been commandeered by elite men. The material bases of nationalism, territorial boundaries, have been maintained solely through the manly arts of warfare and diplomacy, always the former when the latter necessarily fails. The political machinery of statecraftwhether tribal, feudal, monarchical, republican, totalitarian, or communist in natureis itself a kind of warfare, which has been maneuvered predominantly by men. conomy derives from a Greek word meaning the management of a household, a role in most cultures across history conventionally reserved for the woman of the house, with or without her retinue of servants.1 The woman manages the house so that the patriarch can manage the affairs of state. With the emergence of the modern nation-state out of laissez-faire mercantile capitalism, the meaning of conomy increasingly shifts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from being the province of wifely obligation to being identified with the exclusively masculine prerogative of managing the nations prosperity, manipulated through its apparatuses of taxation, trade, finance, expenditure, speculation, and accounting. If society is ordered like a patriarchal family, if the nation is the household of the people, then the husbanding of its money is too important to be left to housewives, whose natural skill for ordering the private home falls away immediately on crossing the threshold into the public sphere.

1 Management of the household does not necessarily mean control of the finances, which were typically (...)

2Although in the everyday muck of political chicanery and monetary speculation the nation is run by men, when it is abstracted into an impossible ideal defined by natural boundaries (which nonetheless must be defended), unified by bonds of kin across kind (which must be disciplined and policed), enriched by a self-regulating economy (that must be constantly monitored), and overseen by heroic patriarchs (whose self-interest is the nations interest),

the nation magically transubstantiates into a woman. This catachrestic practice, whereby the messily manhandled nation is softened into the abstract feminine, may make some sense in terms of the logic at work in mens traffic in women: if the nation is an embattled territory that men must compete to conquer and control, then surely she must be at best a lady, desirous of being wooed, at worst a concubine, rapaciously penetrated. If in the abstract, the nation is referenced through its projected femininity, when men attempt to concretize this abstraction, to insist that the nation can have an imaginable body, a single body that can represent the unimaginable whole, then the nations womanliness is made if not of flesh, then at least of marble or bronze, copper or steel, versified imagery or oil pigment. Beyond the linguistic trick of the abstracted feminine, the very body of the nation is anatomically female. Although we are rarely privy to her private parts, we know that she is biologically female because of her outward womanliness, a femaleness so hyperbolic with mammoth nurturing breasts, a statuesque posture and stance, a phallic armature of draped clothingthat she cannot be feminine in the conventional sense. Again, we see the seeming illogic materialized, whereby the desire to womanize the ideal of the nation contradicts the desire to represent the nations patriarchal machination as political fiat.

2 The Roman allusion is common in British nationalism, which ordains its Empire the proper descendant (...)

3It should come as no surprise that the most powerful concrete embodiments (in statuary, painting, verse, and music) of the national ideal have arisen from the most powerful nations. Great Britains Britannia, for instance, must be quite a mannish woman to rule the waves as she does. This embodiment of Great Britain emerges in the late seventeenth century, is popularized in the early eighteenth after the fusing of England and Wales with Scotland, and becomes an hegemonic icon in the heyday of the Empire under Victoria, whose own memorialization as a monstrous female ponderously seated upright on the throne in statuary all over England and the Commonwealth is an adaptation of Britannia. Sometimes seated on a throne with the stylized sea waves obediently tamed beneath her feet, sometimes standing in the erect posture typical of such iconic monstrous women, Britannia holds in her right hand a shield emblazoned with the Union Jack, in her left a trident, representing her conquest of the seas, and on her head she bears a Roman helmet, a belligerent crown that signals the national will to power as simultaneously an inherited imperialist venture.2 The only sign that she is an anatomical female resides in the classical garments that drape her erect body. The gender catachresis of this embodiment is echoed in the lyrics of James Thomsons Rule Britannia (1740), the military march and unofficial national anthem that verbally and musically matches the statuary icon: Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies, Serves but to root thy native oak. 4On the one hand, Britannia is a shrewish female, fiercely untamable by the warriors of other countries and taming distant seas and lands to her imperial might. Thee haughty

tyrants neer shall tame,/All their attempts to bend thee down. On the other hand, she is a vision of queenly majesty and beauty, untouchable but touching: The Muses, still with freedom found, Shall to thy happy coast repair; Blest Isle! With matchless beauty crowned, And manly hearts to guide the fair. 5Despite Britannias massive strength to put down single-handedly all her foes, she needs, like every fair lady, manly hearts to guide her, to navigate her ship of state. In Britannia the British seek to embody, and thus to mythologize, the notion of a national dispensation whose island boundaries bind so naturally that the nation can be expanded without the ruin of warfare or revolution, the myth of the 1689 bloodless revolution and of the United Kingdom, a myth that obviously serves to repress historically the mutual violence exchanged between English factions as well between England and Scotland over the centuries, and the ongoing unilateral imperialist violence of the most brutal kind being carried out against Ireland at the very moment of the 1707 bloodless union with Scotland.

3 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: U of California Press, (...)

6If Britains monstrous woman appears as rooted to her throne as its native oak is to its island soil, so Frances is befittingly a revolutionary woman of action. The concretized ideal of the republican nation resorts to monstrous womanhood no less than Britains commemoration of its expansive monarchically chartered state. Eugne Delacroixs famous 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People captures the cross-gendering that occurs when the abstract notion of the republican national spirit is concretized in bodily form. Liberty, bare-breasted, is not so much nurturing the nation like a woman as she is goading the revolutionary troops like a great military commander. Her muscular right arm hoists the tricolor while her right hand grasps a musket. Even though she is so determined on forward motion that she appears to be about to burst through the paintings frame as she towers over the male soldiers on the battlefield, she is also gigantically fixed to the ground that she treads, Herculean and immovable. The cause and source of all invasive movement forward for national republicanism, she steps across the dead and dying untroubled by the slightest hint of sentiment, much less hysteria or horror. As a monstrous woman fit for a nation that styles itself a revolutionary republic, Delacroixs Liberty iconographically harkens back to Jeanne dArc, that other monstrous French maiden whose re-embodiment in phallic statuary sublimates the chaste and chastening feminine into the bloodless she-man with a heart constituting the nations armor. Delacroixs representation also draws on the rich iconographic history of the first revolution as La Rpublique, embodied as a female nicknamed Marianne, and as Lynn Hunt points out, in collective memory this name first given Libertythe Republicin derision by opponents of the Revolution soon became a familiar nickname of affection.3 The source of the anti-revolutionary derision resides in the intuitive illogic of this cross-gendering iconography, for what better way to trivialize La Rpublique than to tag it with the name of an ordinary peasant woman, rather than see it as the legitimate progeny of elite great men.

7Of course, the supreme example of a monstrous female embodying the powerful nationstate is Frederic Auguste Bartholdis gargantuan copper sculpture Statue of Liberty (1884). How ironic that the United States, the gun-toting loner cowboy nation, should take as its embodiment a French-concocted monstrous she-man. She is, of course, reminiscent of Delacroixs Liberty, but displacing the tricolor and the gun, she holds the lit torch of liberty in her uplifted right hand and cradles a tablet (representing law) in her left arm. Mythologized as a welcoming totema beacon, the clich goesfor the millions of European immigrants who, yearning to be free, traversed the Atlantic, Liberty also presents a bellicose front, massive, unyielding, and decidedly unfeminine, a phalanx fleshed in 312,000 pounds of copper and steel bearing down on a concrete pedestal of 54,000,000 pounds. She guards the eastern shore of America with a sternly frowning, ugly visage, capped with a treacherous spiked crown.

4 On the normative logic stigmatizing male anal penetration, see Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? (...) 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revis (...)

8The twisted logic of cross-gendered iconography makes sense to the extent that these shemannish icons represent nationalisms ideology of patriarchal procreativity. On the one hand, these monumental women are impregnable, projecting to everything outside its borders that the nation is, like a chaste woman, impenetrable. On the other hand, the nation must be embodied as woman, whose womb, though never pregnant, or at least never showing, forever remains an eager receptacle of impregnation, not only by the leading patriarchs seminal influence but also by the will and desire of the people themselves. A male icon representing the abstract idealization of the national spirit would produce a far queerer figure, and thus a more exposed logic of national vulnerability, for the penetrable man as an icon of national identity would invite not only the stigma of homosexualization but also the absurdity of a nations nonprocreative impotence.4 (We shall see that this disturbing trope of penetrability is especially germane for the construction of a black nation within a nation during the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.) While the gargantuan character of these female icons of nationhood is intended to communicate the impermeability and permanence of the great nation-state, their womanliness at the same time encodes a vulnerability to enemy invasion demanding mens zealous self-guardianship and a vulnerability to temporality scripted in progress-narratives of self-birthing, always about-to-come apogees, and anxieties of decline that must always be pre-empted. National consciousness, as Benedict Anderson has theorized, produces clockable shared time, in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.5 The temporality of nationalism is cross-timed in another sense as well, related to the necessary attempt to figure through cross-gendering the singleness and singularity of the nation as both birthed in the accidents of history and yet also always imaginable beyond the frailties of time; as both a made creature subject to historys ruination and a transcendent ideal impervious to time. This is why these she-male icons must be so massively cast in the hardest stones and metals, unless, like Percy Shelleys Ozymandias, they fragment into the decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare. But even when

they remain ensconced in oil, folklore, verse, origin narratives, and school textbooks without the benefit of stone and steel, they embed themselves so familiarly that their crossgendering illogic becomes invisible, a queer frame of reference that makes what appears within the framethe national subjectivity and its coercive imaginaryseem both socially normal and ideologically normative. 9These monstrous female icons of national identity, in other words, always serve to enshrine a grand national history; they are pedagogical figures in that they rehearse, commemorate, emblematize, and teach (in the most laconic, condensed fashion imaginable) the dominant narrative of national origins, climaxes, and aims. These mass and massive icons seek to obliterate the proliferation and confusion of stories necessarily contradictory to this one hegemonically didactic and exhortatory narrative. National subjects must be constantly re-educated to see the nation itself as impertransible, for it must be seen as impregnable as the wills of the generations of men who rule it in the interest of the men and women subjected to its sway. Otherwise, who would submit themselves to its dictates? At the same time, it must be seen as fragilely poised, like a wife whose chastity must be protected from marauding rapists. Otherwise, who would sacrifice their lives to defend it?

6 See, for instance, Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary (...)

10The transcendentalizing function of the monstrous female icons serves to claim the nations ever-present tense of the now, the idea that it forever reproduces itself anew: While thou shalt flourish great and free, Thomson addresses Britannia as the untouchable beloved. While projecting an eternal now, an always directly addressable thou, fully present in the moment, the monstrous female as iconic identity of the nation ironically also commemorates the origin myth of a nations self-birth and destined progress toward greatness. In the dominant narratives of national origins, the founders, habitually male, seem to give birth to the nation, without women or their wombs, as though, like Zeus birthing Athena full-blown from his head, the nation-state can be a phallocentric virginbirth sown patrimonially from the thoughts and actions of great men. As recent feminist scholarship on the early American and French revolutionary republics indicate, however, motherhood is crucial to republican notions of national origin mythology.6 The Republican Mother tutors the next generation of citizens, prepares them for a leadership grounded in liberty and equality, while herself being excluded from the privileges and rights she nurtures in her male children. Like the Republican Motherwhose exclusion from the nastiness of political, economic, and social power makes her the idealizable nurturer of civic virtue for young male citizensthese monstrous female icons can be made to materialize the nation as a singular figure because woman, as collective identity, is naturally excluded from the nationalist empowerment that she merely serves to purify through abstract allegorization of its ideal. 11This practice of exploiting the female icon to materialize the national ideal may seem as though it is giving voice to womens civic aspirations within the power politics of the nation-state. Indeed, it could be argued that such cross-gendering iconicity reflects the

struggle over how women are to be imagined as citizens from the moment of the emergence of the laissez-faire nation-state. This cross-gendering practice strikes me, however, more compellingly as an instance of the attempt to discipline and silence those ordinary women who could not even adequately serve as the sitters, the models upon whom the male artists could base the fantasy of these monumental female icons. Whether this occurs linguistically by gendering the nation-state in the feminine case (as in la nation and La Rpublique), or allegorically in verse (as in James Thomsons Rule Britannia), or through more literal-minded concrete iconography (such as the U.K.s Britannia, Frances Marianne, or the U.S.s Statue of Liberty), the feminine form serves to purify, emblematize, collectivize, and memorializeand thus to transcendentalizeconcepts of rightful dis/empowerment that are otherwise fraught with cultural-historical strife. The apparently static nature of such imagery distances us from the historical contentiousness of the act of cross-gendering that occurs ideologically in the enunciation or re-erection of patriarchal power through an objectified, if celebrated, she/mannish icon.

II
12When Ernest Gaines chooses a woman as the individual subject for collective memorialization and the iconic medium of racial memory in his 1971 novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he participates in this long tradition of nationalist female iconography. This cross-gendering of the racial imaginary, introjecting a mans vision of racial collectivity and history through a females person, though not exactly a form of cross-dressing, can be usefully analyzed as such. In fact, Gainess novel is an especially loaded treasure-trove for understanding this phenomenon because the novel is doubly invested in this cross-gendering practice: Gainess masculine nationalist history is clothed in a womans body, and yet the woman who is made to speak this nationalist narrative is herself but a cover for the male Messiah, the necessarily male race leader, whom she awaits, nurtures, memorializes, and mourns. Gaines chooses a female subject as the mouthpiece of the national history of African Americans, but ironically when she tells the story of the race, which is synecdoche for the U.S. nation itself, she also tends to absent herself from the story so that it becomes a messianic narrative about the missing male savior who must come to sacrifice himself in liberating the race, and thus fulfilling the promise of the American nation as a whole. There is in the narrative structure, then, a sort of gender double-crossing in that Miss Jane only appears to be the subject of national history, its performance and its enactment. In the course of the narrative, we discover that she is more appropriately a witness, amanuensis, wet-nurse, or most aptly a mammy to this narrative, a woman whose destiny it is to nourish and rear a masculine lineage not properly or wholly her own because seminal male subjects are the true motive, agency, and aim structuring that national history. 13Like the female icons whose giganticism succors the idealized national history of powerful nation-states by abstracting us from the cultural contests and bloody wars that enable nation-formation, Miss Janes womanly voice serves to idealize a heroic national black history by abstracting it from the ideologically embattled dangers of the Black Power present. As we shall see, Miss Jane is not a gigantic woman in the sense of her actual size

(and in fact, Gaines makes her rather diminutive for reasons we shall turn to later), but she is decidedly monstrous in two other regards. She is abnormally long-lived at 110 years, a longevity intimately wedded to her feminine capacity to endure, to suffer, to observe from the relatively domesticated side of the threshold of historical action. She is, as well, metonymically allied with women who are super-sized both within the novel and, subliminally, from outside the novels frame of reference: the female heroes from black history, like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, whose legendary legacies of gargantuan courage sit in judgment over the actions of men who follow. That Miss Jane has lost the capacity to give birth, yet is preeminently the nurturer of others boys, further enhances her iconic status as the abstracted voice of national black history. Like the monstrous female icons and Republican Mothers, her purpose is to prepare the next generation of young males by teaching them the virtue of the race/nation, a virtue that she is exceptionally fitted to inculcate and embody exactly because she is more a transcending witness to history than a participatory agent shaping its course directly. And like these iconic mothers of the nation, Miss Jane is a shrine enthroned to commemorate the male founders and warriors whose lives and deaths are transubstantiated into the lifeblood of the nation.

7 Although the emergence of Black Power is usually dated from 1966, when SNCC leader Stokely Carmicha (...)

14In addition to this double gender-crossing, Gainess novel, which scripts itself as Miss Janes historical memory virtually unmediated, also double-crosses black history in another peculiar sense. Miss Jane is an interlocutor who narrates African American history from enslavement to the novels present (around 1962), ostensibly represented within the novel as the Civil Rights struggle to desegregate the U.S. South. But the novels internal present is conveniently misrepresented in relation to the novels external present. Given that Gaines writes and publishes the novel during the heyday of the Black Power movement (1962-1971), we have to ask why the novels internal present is arrested at the moment of Civil Rights nonviolent resistance, just before the emergence of Black Power as a rallying cry.7 Could it be that the novels cross-gendering dynamic is servicing a more fundamental double-cross related to its integrationist cross-racial agenda? 15I think so. Like those revolutionary Republican Mothers, Miss Jane authenticates the history she remembers partly because as an old woman, a former slave, she narrates it for the pedagogy of future generations, black and white. The internal audience for her heroic history is clearly marked. The most immediate audience is the (racially unmarked but assumed to be black) young historian who has come to record her story. Within the narrative, the other unmediated audience is not so subtly encoded as the young black southern men who are downtrodden, brow-beaten, mealy-mouthed, and Jim Crowed within the novels framethe ones who necessarily fail to become the racial/national messiah. Outside the novels frame, however, Gainess female mouthpiece is indirectly aimed at two shadowing doubles. 1.) The racially ambiguous historian in the originating half-frame of the novel doubles for the white cross-over audience whose response will determine whether Miss Janes story is authenticated and legitimizedand thus assimilatedwithin the heroic American national narrative. 2.) The novels paralyzed young black men on the plantation double for, and thus serve to displace, the defiant young black men, the new

breed of militant, gun-toting, rape-talking, cop-stalking, camera-savvy black nationalists who pick up Robert F. Williamss motto, Negroes with Guns and turn it into a national movement of Black Panthers for Self-Defense. Except for a slight gesture made in the minor character of the unnamed long-head boy, whom we shall examine later, the black nationalist militant haunts the novel from its edges, as Gaines decidedly excludes him from Miss Janes nationalist history of the black race. This exclusion serves to consolidate an American nationalist history, rejecting the rising current of black nationalist fervor contemporaneous with the novel by silencing it as a continuous mode of black agency across and within U.S. history, while at the same time borrowing from its violent imaginary of militant self-defense and racial autonomy. Without Miss Jane as his cross-gendered female raconteur, Gaines could not so effectively conduct this racial double-cross, whereby the black in nationalism is placed under erasure for the re-erection of a desegregated cross-racially constituted (black)American nationalism.

8 By black nationalist history, I mean a history of autonomous blackness devoted to the concept of (...) 9 For shorthand, Ill call these traditional European-derived patriarchal nationstates white nation (...) 10 See, for instance, Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Se (...)

16Before we turn to the novel to observe how Gaines effects this cross-gendered, crossracial double-cross of black nationalism, we must consider how the novel shares with black nationalist ideology a deep ambivalence toward the traditionalone might even say reactionarypractice of cross-gendering the abstracted power of the patriarchal nationstate in the form of a monstrous woman. This deeply shared ambivalence toward the gigantic woman as the fittest icon of national identity will help to index to what extent Gaines is subliminally indebted to the black nationalist impulses of the Black Power movement, even as he self-consciously works to suppress black nationalist history from Miss Janes recounting of national black history.8 Although black nationalism constitutes a revolutionary movement in itself, like the African, Cuban, and Asian anti-colonial independence movements on which it was modeled, the idea of the black nation is heavily indebted to the traditional, often imperialist, imagining of nationalism formulated by powerful nation-states like Britain, France, and the United States. Unlike these powerful white-identified nation-states, however, black nationalists are very skittish about figuring the black nation through the giganticized body of an iconic woman.9 This skittishness certainly derives from the patriarchal (sexist and homophobic) strains within black nationalism that have been productively analyzed by a number of writers.10

11 On the gender logic of the integrationist model, see Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Bl (...) 12 Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); and The Negro Fa (...)

17Intensifying this deviation from the white nationalist norm, however, are two interrelated factors peculiar to black nationalism. First, unlike white-identified nation-states, the black

nation is more a cultural prophecy and political demand than an established political formation with material boundaries, economic superstructures, civil institutions, and state bureaucratic apparatuses. The institutionalized patriarchy of white nation-states gives them the luxury of capitalizing on monstrous female icons as a pedagogy of abstraction and purification. The black nation does not have such a luxury. Second, given the ways in which black men have been represented as deprived of patriarchal status within their own households, much less within the civil public sphere, the idea of the black nation is riddled with anxiety where womens leadership role is concerned. This anxiety is most frequently manifested as a desire to discipline the so-called black matriarch as possessing too much influence within the home and within the public sphere not only in black nationalist discourse of the 1960s and 70s but also in assimilationist discourse seeking to normalize the African American family by reclaiming the black male as proper head of the house and legitimate head of the racial family.11 In fact, the notion that the black matriarch supplants the proper role of the black man as the proper head of the house and the legitimate head of the race grows out of the 1930s sociological work of E. Franklin Frazier, is codified as national policy by the infamous Moynihan report of 1965, and then ironically becomes foundational to revolutionary black nationalist thought.12 Whereas Frazier and Moynihan were concerned that the nonconforming gender arrangements within African American communities prevented social and economic assimilation into the American national norm, the black nationalists were concerned that black womens visible roles in helping to lead the race disrupted the potential for black men to contest in hand-to-hand combat the white male rulers over the territorial boundaries, symbolic and actual, of the black nation-inwaiting. 18In comparison with white women, black women historically were at the forefront of the public image and public work of leading the race not only as mothers and managers of the household and of culture but also as activists, politicians, breadwinners, intellectuals, educators, lawyers, and armed warriors. In trying to domesticate the strong black woman, black nationalists were also attempting to revise the heroic narrative of black nationmaking by demoting and diminishing the presence of celebrated race heroes like Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman (the first female American military commander), Anna Julia Cooper, Madame C. J. Walker (first black and first female American millionaire), Maggie Walker (first American woman to own a bank), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (anti-lynching leader and one of the first individuals to litigate against segregated railway transportation), Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates, Constance Baker Motley (who argued the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court), Fannie Lou Hamer, and Shirley Chisholm (first black and first woman to run for U.S. president). Although such women represented a long tradition of relatively more equal public race leadership, increasingly across the 1960s black nationalists were alarmed by the implications of this black matriarchy, an alarm amplified by the emergence of the womens liberation movement simultaneously with Black Power. Michele Wallace perfectly sums up this masculine panic over the black matriarchy during this period in her classic Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman:

13 Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso, 1978), 91.

She was too domineering, too strong, too aggressive, too outspoken, too castrating, too masculine. She was one of the main reasons the black man had never been properly able to take hold of his situation in this country. The black man had troubles and he would have to fight the white man to get them solved but how would he ever have the strength if his own house was not in proper order, if his wife, his woman, his mother, his sisters, who should have been his faithful servants, were undermining him at every opportunity.13 19In other words, the matriarch was a monstrous woman, but not an iconic one made merely of stone and steel, oil strokes and versified imagery, but instead one made of flesh and bone. Because she had been so visible on the frontlines of the race war historically, the heroic black woman could represent and embody the race, and thus the black nation, not just allegorically in the manner of a cross-gendering monument, but in the day-to-day struggles and legendary battles over racial autonomy and equality on the ground. 20If the black matriarch was too real a presence for black men to follow the customary white nationalist practice of cross-gendering the collective memory through her abstract iconization, it was also the case that the practical impact of her race work materially, socially, economically, intellectually, and politically was too influential to be purged or repressed. Lacking the economic resources for such a luxury of patriarchal imagination in oversized steel and stone on the scale of the Statue of Liberty or the Queen Victoria statue, black nationalist practice most frequently resorted to more figurative embodiments of the gigantic feminine in art, poetry, song, and dance. Ironically, at the very moment when black nationalist ideologues were trying to diminish her heroic resonance among African Americans, the reverence for the image of the strong black woman intensified along with the conflicted ambivalence toward her as a fitting icon of black peoples historical triumph. The paradoxical logic of black nationalism is that even as black men needed to domestic the black matriarchto put her in her historical place behind and protected by the warring menthey also needed to monumentalize the notion of the strong mother of the black nation. If the black nationalist man was to bear the wounds of frontline battle, she was to bear the womb that would birth and rear future race warriors. Although black nationalists aimed to discipline and domesticate her for the purposes of procreative nationalism, the actual image of the black mother of the nation ironically was a double for the black matriarch: an over-sized woman, with ample thighs and hips for birthing black warriors, voluptuous breasts for nursing the nation, and a full head of militantly natural hair to connect the black nation to the motherland, Mother Africa. 21The gigantic black womanlegendary, monumental, matriarchalproliferated across the Black Power decade in dance, art, theater, literature, music, posters, political leaflets, Blacksploitation movies, and commercial advertising. As black women adopted the natural or Afro style, the big hair grew emblematically to fit the size of their monstrous visibility in every conceivable medium. In her 1976 collection of verse, how i got ovah, Carolyn Rodgers perfectly captures this sense of the Afros giganticizing effect on the black womans individual and collective psyche and social image:

14 Rodgers, how i got ovah (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976), 1.

told my sweet mama to leave me alone about my wild free knotty and nappy hair cause i was gon lay back and let it grow so high it could reroute its roots and highjack the sky!14

15 Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). Hereafter cited as A (...)

22As black male nationalists worried over the black matriarchs highjacking of the conventional masculine obligations of nation-founding and -building, warmongering and negotiating, they also could not help but fantasize these mothers of the nation as Amazonian breeders. We see this image in Melvin Van Peebless wildly popular revolutionary black nationalist film, Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song (1971), which appeared the same year as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.15 The young Sweetback, an orphan, is taken in by a brothel of full-bodied matriarchs. In the classic scene that starts the movie, Van Peebles focuses the camera on the womens ample breasts encircling the young boy, the revolutionary-in-the-making, as they feed the scrawny boy with heaping bowls of food. Then we see the boy (played by Mario van Peebles, Melvins son) being initiated into sex with one of these women. As the little boy is placed atop the large woman, she climaxes over the course of a camera trick that enables us in a few seconds to observe the boy grow into the adult Sweetback (played by Melvin Van Peebles), who, grown to full size, redresses the gender imbalance, as he now, a big top man, appropriately dominates and masters the prostitute as he pleases her sexually.

16 Snellings, Earth, in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry (...)

23As mother of the black nation, fecund and nourishing, the black nationalist icon sexualizes the black woman while attempting to redress, revenge, and repudiate the idea that he has failed as a true race warrior in allowing his women to be raped by the slave master. The poet Rolland Snellings captures this sentiment in his 1968 poem, Earth, dedicated to Mrs. Mary Bethune and the African and Afro-American women: Where are the warriors, the young men?/Who guards the womens quartersthe burnt-haired/ womens quarters /and hears their broken sobbing in the night?16 Ostensibly addressed to Mrs. Bethune and all black women metonymically apostrophized as Mother of the World, by the closure of the poem, the rhetorical question has been redirected to the young black men who must take up the challenge of protecting the women: Fecund, Beating Heart! Enduring Earth!: Only you remain!

Where are the warriors, the young men? Who guards the womens quarters?... (italics and ellipses in original) 24In structure, this poem performs the same cross-gender double-cross as Gainess AMJP, but toward the aim of a black nationalist armed defense against the white nationalist rulers. By placing the black male warrior squarely between the fecund black woman and the raping white master, black male nationalists hoped to keep the monumental black woman as icon of mothering nationhood while banishing the myth of her sexual complicity by preempting her historical role as an unprotected body penetrable by white nationalist men.

17 For a reproduction and good commentary on this painting, see Sharon Patton, African-American Art (O (...)

25As much as black nationalist men needed the oversized black mother of the nation as a memorializing icon to birth, rear, and mourn future black male warriors, black women ambivalently played to this script and fiercely resisted it at the same time. A female contributor to the same 1968 Black Fire anthology where Snellingss poem appeared, Odaro (Barbara Jones, slave name) pens the poem Alafia, in which she answers the black males call for a companionable, desirable woman ready to please. Her poem begins self-consciously and seemingly subserviently to the wishes of the leading black men: I am writing at the request of/Larry Neal, Ed Spriggs and Harold Foster/Who seem to think that you/Might be interested in my/Poetry (Black Fire 356). The poem concludes with a touch of ambiguity concerning the womans secondary place: Black Woman, Queen of the World. Similarly, when the artist Betye Saar produces her mixed-media painting, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), she alludes to the notion of black female complicity when she includes an inset of a light-skinned mammy holding a white baby.17 Imposed on the complicit mammy, however, is a black fist, blocking the mammys womb. Rising above the inset mammy is a massive, dark-skinned image of the handkerchief-headed Aunt Jemima, her ample breasts appearing to flow over the inset portrait of the light-skinned mammy. Duplicitously, the over-sized Aunt Jemima holds in her right hand a broom, but like Delacroixs Liberty, she subverts her femininity and fulfills her phallic potential by holding at the same time a handgun propped against the broom, and in her left hand a rifle. Reclaiming the legendary soldiering of Harriet Tubman in the same frame as the minstrel image, Saar refuses to banish or suppress the positive aggression of the black matriarch as a race woman fit for warring leadership.

III
26As Mother of the World and Mother Africa, the black nationalist image of gigantic womanhood was so embattled in the late 1960s and early 70s that even a novel like AMJP that attempts to banish this gender controversy from its narrative frame cannot fully succeed in shutting it out. The criticism on AMJP constantly refers to this odd gendercrossing. Valerie Melissa Babbs chapter on the novel, for instance, is entitled, From History to Her-story, but characteristic of the work on Gaines, she celebrates this technique as giving an unmediated voice to black womens history.18 Applauding the

novel as history lesson, Mary Ellen Doyle also notices, in passing, that its structure and themes are anchored in Gainess exploration of manhood.19 Contradicting herself in viewing the novel as essentially the story of one woman, Doyle goes on to observe that Gaines was frankly searching for the definition and practice of manhood in a racially conditioned world. In the four men of the novel, he continued that search and projected some conclusions (152). Karen Carmean puts it more forthrightly when she writes, Another way of viewing the books structure is in seeing it centered not only around Jane but also around the four men in her life: Ned, Joe Pittman, Tee Bob, and Jimmy.20 Carmean, though, sees this structure as ultimately redounding to the authenticity of Miss Janes feminine perspective. Although she does not see the implications of her observation, Carmean connects the character of Miss Jane directly to Gainess exclusion of black nationalist ideology: By now the spirit of a 110-year-old woman had taken over his imagination, and, undeterred by the unsettled politics of the late 1960s, Gaines would shut out the voices of protest to listen to Miss Jane Pittman (8). Like many other critics, Carmean connects Gainess canonization directly to AMJP, a novel that secured for him a firm place in American literature because, no longer to be categorized as a black author, wiser critics understand how this noveland its authortranscended limiting categories (9). Gainess novel achieves its cherished status in the integrated American nationalist canon through this cross-gendering maneuver, whereby Miss Janes voice serves to contain and suppress a messier history of cross- and intra-racial division.21

18 Babb, Ernest Gaines (Boston: Twayne/G. K. Hall, 1991), 76-96. Babb writes: It is noteworthy that G (...) 19 Doyle, Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ (...) 20 Carmean, Ernest J. Gaines, A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 62. 21 Gaines has to work hard not only in the novel but also in interviews to chart his lineage as one mo (...) 22 Ruth Laney, A Conversation with Ernest Gaines, in Conversations with Ernest Gaines, ed. by John L (...)

27Gainess portrait of Miss Jane is based on his great-aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson, who, according to Gaines, did not walk a day in her life but who taught me the importance of standing.22 Gaines continues, Well, this is the kind of courage that I tried to give Miss Jane in the book. Alongside her courage, Gaines admires Miss Augusteen for her longsuffering. Unable to walk, [s]hed crawl over the floor as a child six or seven months might crawl (56), and he never heard her complaining about her problems (56-57). Like Miss Augusteen, Miss Janes predominant characteristic is a courage that comes from her long suffering. Although Miss Jane has spunk, she is a small, slight woman. When she discovers that she is barren, the doctor suggests that whatever happened to her as a girl probably also stunted her growth (AMJP 80). It is crucial that Miss Jane does not fit the mold of the big black matriarch. Gaines instead invests her capacity to embody black history in her age, her voice, and her barrenness. Her age provides continuity to the narrative from enslavement to Civil Rights. Her voice indicates Janes modesty, her

circumspection. She must be coached into telling her own story, and even then the story is not about her. She is no back-talking, sassy woman. Like Rosa Parks, the Mother of the Civil Rights movement, to whom she is compared in the novel, she is respectful, humble, soft-spoken, but proud. Her barrenness fits her more perfectly for rearing others children, the white offspring of her masters. Technically, Jane is a mammy. Rather than Saars massive black Aunt Jemima with a gun in each hand, Jane is more like the inset portrait, the light-skinned mammy carrying a white baby and whose womb is blocked by the Black Power fist. Because she has worked for so long in the masters house, tending to the masters youth, as Jane ages, she becomes an intermediary, the auntie respected among whites because she is respectful, hardworking, and non-threatening. Relieved of the burden and the joyof her own biological children, Miss Janes barren womb also becomes a repository not only for the black past but also for the black future, the hope for a messiah. She is destined to rear these potential messiahs, and also to mourn them in the inevitable eventuality of their being lynched.

23 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845; New York: Penguin Books, 1982 (...)

28Although Jane is not a big black matriarch, she is identified with a series of such, each brought into the frame of the narrative briefly only to be expunged by death or banishment. Miss Janes own mother is just such a phallic woman. When the overseer tries to whip Janes mother, she defies him: You might try and whip me, but nobody say you gon succeed. When the overseer tells her to pull up her dress, she responds: You the big man, you pull it up (29). When he tries to strike her, she tries to choke him. It is a brutal battle, reminiscent of Frederick Douglasss with the slave-breaker Covey, a fight that Douglass wins, a triumph that enables his famous quip, You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.23 Despite her sass and her strength, Miss Janes mother is not allowed this triumphant experience of being transformed from a slave into a (wo)man. Her gender monstrosity, on the one hand, makes her defiance possible, but the same feature, ironically, seals her fate in an early death. And she is not quite a martyr, for this role is saved for the lynched male messiahs. 29The first monstrous matriarch identified with Miss Jane is Big Laura, an amalgamation of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Big Laura takes over the leadership of the emancipated party headed northward with a booming, Move out the way. Miss Jane describes this she-man thus: She was big just like her name say, and she was tough as any man I ever seen. She could plow, chop wood, cut and load much cane as any man on the place (17). Big Laura is killed in the massacre, but only after taking one of the patrollers to his death. Unlike Big Laura and her own mother, Miss Jane is not a monstrous female who talks back and strikes back at the overseer. Instead, she is destined to survive, for it is only the survivor who can become the first-hand narrator, and it is only the survivor who can mourn those like Big Laura, her own mother, and her adopted sons, whose aggressive self-respect must end in violent death. 30Big Laura serves as a foil to Miss Jane, but the logic of the narrative dictates that she be expunged, to rebalance the excess of her female monstrosity with the restraint of Janes

more accommodating survivalist ethos. Another monstrous matriarch who makes a cameo appearance is Black Harriet, an oversized woman whose mannish excess more clearly induces gender panic, and upon her defeat, pity. She didnt have all her faculties, but still she was queen of the field. She was tall, straight, tough, and blue-black. Could pick more cotton, chop more cotton than anybody out there. Cut more cane than anybody out there, man or women, except for Toby Lewis (137). When challenged by another woman, Black Harriet goes berserk, destroying the cotton in a frenzy of excessive chopping. When the overseer begins to beat her mercilessly, Harriet was just laying there laughing and talking in that Singalee tongue. Looking at us with her eyes all big and white one second, then say something in that Singalee tongue the next second, then all of a sudden just bust out laughing (139). In Black Harriet, Gaines embodies the big black matriarch as threat not only to the planters demand for fast work but also to the other black laborers, who root for Harriets challenger. Black Harriets mannish excesses turn her at once into a minstrel Aunt Jemima and a hysterical madwoman. Just as the black nationalists experienced panic over the black matriarch, stigmatizing her as a gender monster who must be disciplined or banished, so Gaines banishes Black Harriet from the novels frame. An incident extraneous to the novels plot, Black Harriets experience of going berserk and getting beaten is nonetheless crucial to the novels gender dynamic. It reinforces Miss Janes iconic status as barren mammy, circumscribed witness, and accommodating voice, a Clio who inspires black history without exciting a panic identified with the alarming violence, defiance, and autonomy projected onto Black Power by the dominant discourse as a form of anger that ignites racial madness. 31If Miss Jane is metonymically related to the monstrous matriarch through studied negationa winnowing of her person and voice into a frail, barren, ancient presenceshe is even more related to the promise of the black male messiah. After Big Lauras death, Miss Jane takes on the obligation of rearing the she-mans son, Ned. Once he is grown, Ned leaves for the frontier, then returns to build a school on the plantation. Miss Janes intermediary role is best captured in her relationship to Albert Cluveau, the Cajun who has performed many racial killings for the white male rulers, and the man who has been commanded to take her adopted sons life. On the one hand, Miss Jane rears the defiant young man who seeks black autonomy. On the other hand, she goes fishing with the man hired to perform his lynching. Beyond Ned, the narrative moves toward Jimmy, who, from his birth is nominated as the One. When Jimmy returns to the plantation to plan a desegregation march to the whites only water fountain, he becomes to Miss Jane as Martin Luther King, Jr. was to Rosa Parks. They had picked out a girl to drink from the white peoples fountain. (This was their Miss Rosa Parks) (246). After Jimmys lynching, it is Miss Jane Pittman who determines to take the girls place. At first sight, it might appear that Miss Jane has become not a witness or a repository but instead a maker and leader of the black nation. More precisely, she is needed because of her intermediary mammy role. What white man will beat a humble old woman, even when shes drinking from the white fountain? According to Jimmys plan, it must be a female who drinks from the fountain. The reason they didnt choose a boy, they was afraid that loon up there might beat the boy and not arrest him. They wanted somebody in jail because they wanted to march on the courthouse the next Monday (246). Even in her culminating act of courage, Miss Jane is a

substitute, a diminutive body to hold back the white lynchers violence, a symbol of racial restraint.

24 In the made-for-T.V. movie, the young historian is played by a white actora decision that is very (...)

32There is a sense in which Miss Janes march to the fountainnot pictured in the novel but made the climax of the 1974 made-for-T.V. moviedisplaces the potential for a more revolutionary image of black female resistance, an image proliferating all over the U.S. in the early 1970s and one that the white media were eager to counter. Miss Janes march further displaces the more conventional image of black nationalist male defiance that alarmed the authorities, black and white, all across America at this moment. The closest we come to such a representation in the novel is not Jimmy, the level-headed messiah blessed by Reverend King, but instead Jimmys unnamed friend, a smart-assed, disrespectful young man to whom Miss Jane immediately takes a strong disliking. This long head boy, as she calls him, stands in as a pale double for the black nationalist menace that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover calls Americas number one enemy. The long head boy hot-headedly insists on Miss Janes leading the march: With her leading us on, multitudes will follow. Miss Jane refuses to even look at him, instead looking at her messiah. Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. The people, Jimmy? You listening to that thing that boy call retrick [rhetoric] and counting on the people? (248). Miss Jane voices the doubts about the people interwoven into this narrative scripted in the illiterate folk voice of one of the people. In having Miss Jane so decisively dismiss the long head boy, his retrick, and his naive faith in the people, Gaines is able to dismiss within the narrative those black nationalists who have been banished from the novels frame. What frames the novelor more precisely, half-frames it, is the young historians Introduction.24 In telling the black story to him, rather than the wild-eyed black nationalists, she entrusts it to responsible hands. Through his professional skills, the young male historian will ensure that the narrative is interwoven into the American national history. And it has been, as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, novel and film, is one of the most popular texts on slavery taught in schools, frequently taught as though it is history, rather than fiction. 33The novels cross-racial success is scripted in its cross-gendered voice. Gaines erects Miss Jane as a feminine icon who prophesies the integrated, interracial, harmonious United States nation that emerges ironically out of black folks capacity to endure and transcend an entrenched history of state-endorsed racial violence and abjection. He chooses a woman as his medium/subject both to envelop and contain the image of the gigantic black matriarch as ambivalent black nationalist icon and to counter that image in favor of a conscientious black folk eager to join the white nationthe black (wo)man as the purifying conscience of the historically compromised American nation-state. On the one hand, Gainess iconography has the benefit of disturbing and subverting the normatively masculine stance of black nationalism by figuring a woman whose cross-gendering is less aggressively patriarchal in size and intent, more ambivalently feminine in spirit and form. On the other hand, it has the effect of softening and thus blunting the militant agency of a defiant black collective conscience and consciousness.

1 Management of the household does not necessarily mean control of the finances, which were typically the province of the male head of house. 2 The Roman allusion is common in British nationalism, which ordains its Empire the proper descendant of Roman imperialism. Once conquered by Rome, Britain now stands ready to conquer the same world Rome once ruled. In some versions, Britannia proffers an olive branch in her left hand, while the shield is in her right and the trident is balanced in the crook of her bent right elbow. 3 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1984), 62. 4 On the normative logic stigmatizing male anal penetration, see Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988, 1996), 197-222. When male figures are used to allegorize some aspect of the nation-state, they seem to be exploited more for self-divided domestic consumption than the purpose of representing the whole to itself and to outsiders. For instance, John Bull represents not quite the spirit of the whole nation as an institution but instead almost its opposite, the rambunctious, stolid, commonsense average Briton, the people, as opposed to the monarchy, aristocracy, Parliament, and government ministry. The U.S. figure of Uncle Sam emerges within the late 18th- and early 19th-century popular press, often as a way either of endearing citizens to its government far distant in Washington, D.C. or frequently of lampooning that government. During World War I, this figure is expropriated for the purposes of recruiting young men into the military. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 1983, 1991), 24. 6 See, for instance, Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 11-12, 73113; Rosemarie Zagarri, Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother, American Quarterly 44.2 (June 1992), 192-215; Mary Beth Norton, Libertys Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, 1996), 243-255; and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially 89-124. 7 Although the emergence of Black Power is usually dated from 1966, when SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) is usually credited with forging Black Power as a rallying cry, I have chosen to date it according to the publication of Robert F. Williamss influential 1962 text, Negroes with Guns, which documented and rationalized the Monroe, North Carolina movement of men and women who, against the policy of the national NAACP, adopted armed self-defense as the only Civil Rights strategy capable of dealing with the unyielding reactionary violence of the local KKK. This dating is crucial because it denies the customary distinction separating the Martin Luther King, Jr.-led nonviolent movement of the rural South versus the militant black nationalist temper of the urban north. See Williams, Negroes with Guns, with a foreword by Gloria House, introduction by Timothy B. Tyson (1962; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 8 By black nationalist history, I mean a history of autonomous blackness devoted to the concept of the African American people as a separate nation within an oppressive American nation-state. By national black history, I mean a more assimilationist history of black people as deserving an integrated, if distinguishable, role within the heroic American nationalist narrative. The relationship between Black Power and black nationalism is

extremely complex, far too much so to indicate this complexity here in my analysis. Although I tend to conflate the two, I am very much aware that Black Power and black nationalism should not be fully equated. The former labels a cluster of organizations and movements (including the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the Black Arts movement, US, The Republic of New Africa, and the Revolutionary Action Movement, to name the most noted ones), whereas black nationalism takes many forms and degrees of commitment to a nationalist project across these various groups and movements. On the history and meanings of Black Power and black nationalism, see William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1967, 1992). 9 For shorthand, Ill call these traditional European-derived patriarchal nation-states white nations, though, of course, the racial tag tends to silence the highly contested racial imaginaries and economies of these countries historically and currently. 10 See, for instance, Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 311-335; Cheryl Clarke, The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community, in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 197-208; Charles I. Nero, Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature, in Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill (Boston: Alyson, 1991), especially 243-246; Joyce Hope Scott, From Foreground to Margin: Female Configuration and Masculine SelfRepresentation in Black Nationalist Fiction, in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 296-312; Robert Reid-Pharr, Tearing the Goats Flesh: Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity, in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 353-376; Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 1432; Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 48-59; and Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 186-224. 11 On the gender logic of the integrationist model, see Marlon B. Ross, Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era (New York: New York University Press, 2004), especially 21-89. 12 Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932); and The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939). Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1965). 13 Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso, 1978), 91. 14 Rodgers, how i got ovah (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976), 1. 15 Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). Hereafter cited as AMJP. Im grateful to Deborah McDowell for pointing out in a

conversation how the procreative image of the voluptuous mother of the nation also embeds a black male fantasy to be mothered, to be nurtured and taken care of. 16 Snellings, Earth, in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1968), 327. 17 For a reproduction and good commentary on this painting, see Sharon Patton, AfricanAmerican Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 200-202. 18 Babb, Ernest Gaines (Boston: Twayne/G. K. Hall, 1991), 76-96. Babb writes: It is noteworthy that Gaines invents a female narrator. Rarely has American history been chronicled through the perspective of a black woman, and to allow a black womans voice to recall history is a striking act of fictional revision (77). 19 Doyle, Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 153. In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as a Fictional Edited Autobiography, Doyle asks, Is this a mans book, a masculine manipulation of Miss Janes viewpoint, as though Miss Jane is a real historical person, rather than a fictive construction. She continues, The novel is a mans rendition of a womans experience, and thus a mans concerns are reflected in the text. Yet the edited text is not therefore, unauthentic. See Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, ed. by David C. Estes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 102-103. 20 Carmean, Ernest J. Gaines, A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 62. 21 Gaines has to work hard not only in the novel but also in interviews to chart his lineage as one modeled on William Faulkners southern-drenched universalism, as opposed to, for instance, Richard Wrights black protest tradition. See, for instance, Gainess comments on Native Son in Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton, Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writers Craft (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 36-37. For commentary on Gainess self-framing of his patrilineage away from black male writers, see Keith Clark, Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 65-93. 22 Ruth Laney, A Conversation with Ernest Gaines, in Conversations with Ernest Gaines, ed. by John Lowe (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 56. 23 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845; New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 107. 24 In the made-for-T.V. movie, the young historian is played by a white actora decision that is very telling.

Narrating and Imaging the Nation

Workshop Three: Gender, Sexuality and the Nation ABSTRACTS Dr David Alderson (English and American Studies, Manchester) Queer Globalism: Queer as Folk, Commodification and Sexual Politics This paper will focus initially on the ways in which gay identity has been constituted historically and globally through commodification. Through a focus principally on the British version of Queer as Folk - but also making reference to the American adaptation of it - the

paper will examine the ideological tensions between local and global identities, and the ways in which the series attempts to reconcile these tensions in ways which are indicative of a contemporary political sensibility which disavows 'political correctness'. Nonetheless - as with all processes of globalisation - there are those who are excluded, and the paper also considers the ways in which the series' subplot constitutes the immigrant Ghanaian figure of Lance as unassimilable to its 'progressive' ideological vision.

Dr Daria Berg (East Asian Studies, Durham) Queen of the Bordellos: Qinhuai Revisited The pleasure quarters at the banks of the Qinhuai river in the city of Nanjing have continued to exercise the imagination of Chinas literati and scholars until modern times. Established by the first Ming emperor (r. 1368-98), the Qinhuai entertainment district in the prosperous Yangzi river delta flourished throughout the Ming (1368-1644) era but was reduced to ruins after the dynastic fall and never regained its past glamour. The present paper investigates perceptions of the Qinhuai courtesan from various perspectives, using both literary and non-literary sources by late imperial Chinese male and female writers. Analysis focuses on representations of the famous courtesan, poet and painter Xue Susu (fl. 1575-1635) by writers of different background, gender and classsuch as the contemporary and later literati, the gentry wives and the courtesans, including Xue Susu herself. Late imperial Chinese discourse embeds the image of the courtesan in the cult of emotions, the formation of new beauty ideals and issues of gender roles, emancipation and power. Paradoxes surrounding the figure of the female entertainer and historical circumstancessuch as the economic boom of the seventeenth century and the growth of the publishing industryreveal the complexity of the social network of negotiations and exchange trading the image of the Queen of Qinhuai.

Dr Alev Cinar (Political Science, Bilkent University, Turkey) Forging Images of Women, Building a Nation: Turkish Nationalism Between Islam and Secularism
This lecture will address the ways in which images of women have been a key medium through which secular modernity was institutionalized and the nation building project was carried out in Turkey. It examines the ways in which gender identities and bodies become implicated in the building of the nation state and the creation of a national identity as well

as the challenges brought to official nationalism by contending nationalist/political projects. Mainly, it compares two distinct time periods in Turkish history one, the formation of the new modern nation state in the 1920s, and second, the challenges brought to official secular national ideology by Islamist contenders in the 1990s. During the early years of the Republic bodies and gender roles became implicated in the building of a new state and the making of a new national identity through tightly engineered regulations and monitoring of clothing and public visibility. The new Turkish state not only passed the Hat Law that instituted modern Western clothing as the official attire of men in public offices, but also undertook several measures to enhance the public visibility of Western-looking women occupied in modern professions and engaged in a modern life-style. This was a strategy that allowed the state and the political elite to display the secular, modern and Westernized identity of the new nation-state through womens bodies and their clothing. Womens bodies served this function particularly well, because the veil was seen as a symbol of the power and authority of the Ottoman state to dress its subjects in accordance with Islamic values, from which the secular state wanted to distance itself. Likewise, the Islamist elite of the 1990s instituted their Islamism by re-veiling the female body, similarly using the body and its clothing as a site from which their national project was articulated. This new Islamist elite found political agency in designating the Islamic headcovering as the banner of their political campaign. Separated by almost 70 years, these two interventions have a vital similarity: they both employ similar strategies in implementing their policies. Namely, in both cases gender roles and womens images become one of the central sites through which these nationalist projects are carried out, whether it was the institutionalization of official secular nationalism or its Islamist contender. Both the secularizing state of the 1920s and the Islamists of the 1990s used womens images in similar ways in promoting their political agendas and as a tool for acquiring political agency. Prof Catherine Davies (Spanish and Portuguese, Manchester) Gendering Latin American Independence: the Textual Construction of Gender in the Political Writings of Simn Bolvar The research for this paper is part of a larger AHRB-funded project 'Gendering Latin American Independence: Women's Political Culture and the Textual Construction of Gender' one of the aims of which is to rethink the history of Spanish American independence by studying the textual construction of gender in political discourse and exploring the interaction between gender culture and political culture. In this paper I will present a close textual analysis of the ' Liberator' Simn Bolvars (1783-1830) famous Jamaican Letter (1815) written while he was in exile (from Venezuela) in Kingston. This is one of his most important political manifestos, written at a crucial moment when it seemed that the cause of the Spanish American revolutions had been lost. A gendered reading reveals a mythic structure that points up the aporias and limitations of liberal discourse in South America.

Dr Rajjinder Kumar Dudrah (Sociology, Portsmouth) Secret Politics: Promiscuous Pleasures in Bollywood films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes Ashis Nandy has usefully described popular Hindi cinema as a form of shared and tacit political knowledge amongst its audiences in India. Bollywood there has enabled, and responded to, politics and society from the everyman/woman viewpoint. In contradistinction, Madhva Prasad has warned of the dangers of the ideological workings of Bollywood that are at once hegemonic and status-quo affirming. Arjun Appadurai has usefully described the interplay of diasporic ethnoscapes and mediascapes that enable a commentary on the interplay of social subjects and cultural texts. This paper articulates these three viewpoints together towards a reading of the uses of Bollywood cinema in Britain amongst a section of its diasporic Asian audiences that glean pleasure from the sexual and political promiscuity that Bollywood films offer. Dr Rajinder Dudrah is currently a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Portsmouth. From September 2002, he will be a Lecturer in Screen Studies in the Dept. of Drama, University of Manchester.

Dr Hoda Elsaddah (English, Cairo) Gendering the Nation: Conflicting Masculinities in Selected Short Stories by Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi The cultural history of the Middle East is usually narrated using a progressive model of development. It identifies the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 as the starting point for the introduction of liberal ideas of democracy, modern freedoms, constitutional government, citizenship, and rights for women. Hence an encounter with the West is marked as a turning point for reform, social transformation and progress. This modernist story established a rigid binary opposition between tradition and modernity, between a backward past and a progressive present, between old and new. Many Arab and western historians of the Middle East have accepted the above-mentioned assumptions in varying degrees and have identified two major trends of thought: a secularist trend that aspires to emulate western ways and ideas, and a traditionalist trend that rejects modernity and directs its eyes to the past for guidance. The picture is naturally more complicated with a middle trend that aspired to bridge the gap between the modern ideas and Arab cultural tradition, a nationalist movement that fought for independence and struggled against colonial western influences, but still accepted the supremacy of European civilization. In general, writers, public figures, cultural events and cultural products are classified accordingly: either liberal( read: western oriented, progressive, modern) or conservative( read: Islamist, traditional, backward). This polarized picture is applied to qualify approaches to gender issues. Hence, and according to mainstream historical narratives, secular, liberal trends of thought promoted womens rights while traditional Islamist trends resisted them and advocated womens confinement to their homes.

The 1990s witnessed a surge of research that critiqued the modernization narrative and challenged assumptions about the inherent opposition between traditional societies and modern societies. Nevertheless, the dichotomy persists, and cultural producers and their products are still classified in modernist terms. My aim in this paper is to challenge the foundational principles of the existing dichotomy between Islamist and secular as regards gender issues by exploring commonalities rather than differences, and highlighting ambiguities and ambivalences. My assumption is that a close analysis of narrative texts dealing with gender issues can potentially allow us to listen to silenced notes in dominant discursive practices. In these narrative discourses, writers imaged the nation for themselves and for future generations. They constructed representations of ideal manhood and ideal womanhood. They tackled the pressing socio-cultural issues that posited a challenge to their generation, and mixed them with their personal dreams and fears. They shaped their images against the turbulent background of colonial presence, struggles for independence and attempts to affirm the cultural and religious and national selfhood against a colonizing, yet attractive western other. These narratives constructed by the men of the nation prescribed and guided. They also gave expression to the inner conflicts and ambivalences that were inevitably contained in the national narrative. For this particular presentation, I have chosen to study selected short stories written by Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi, published in the cultural magazine, al-Risalah (1933-1953). Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafi (1880-1937) is classified as conservative, traditional and Islamic. His famous battle with Taha Hussein over the latters book, On Pre-Islamic Poetry, published as a book, significantly entitled Under the banner of the Quran, secured him the reputation for being a hard core conservative, and made him the target of attack by representatives of liberal thought such as Abbas al-Aqad and many others. Also in the cultural battles that raged between conservatives and innovators, al-muhafizun wal mugadidun, he was firmly in the conservative camp. These battles ranged from disagreements on literary innovation, the relationship between colloquial Arabic and Classical Arabic, the desired or undesired changes in language styles and literary genres, different points of view that reflected socio-political forces at work in society. In all his writings, he was vehemently critical of the life style and values the European woman who was presented by the liberal group as the role-model for the future Egyptian woman. He denounced what he perceived to be the moral laxity and promiscuity of the west and called for the protection and preservation of the moral superiority of the Islamic family and Muslim woman. He repeatedly referred to the woes and disasters incurred upon the nation due to the marriages between Egyptian men and foreign women. In his short stories written in the last few years of his life, al-RafI set out to define the parameters of masculinity and femininity in the modern nation. Close attention to his narrative texts and personal life reveals an ambivalence that gives us insight into his worldview and ideological commitment. Dr Priya Gopal (English, Cambridge) Beyond 'Resolution': Gender and the Struggle for National Community

This paper examines the work of feminist and communist writer, Rashid Jahan, who wrote in the 1930s and 40s on Indian women's experience of space in colonial, urban(izing) contexts. I read her story ' One of my Journeys' to, among other things, interrogate Partha Chatterjee's account of the nationalist "resolution" of the women question. "One of My Journeys" is also an investigation of utopian possibilities in the reconfiguring of spatial relations. Rashid Jahan's insistence on women's political agency warns against reducing the scope of women's actions by reading them as only signs or objects of reform: an insight that has great relevance to the question of feminism and the formation of national communities today. Dr Lesley A Hall (History and Understanding of Medicine, Wellcome Trust) Jerusalem in Englands Green and Pleasant Land: British utopian visions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Englishness is often constructed as being about England as a colonising imperial power, or else in terms of a conservative and apparently timeless pastoralism of cricket and morrisdancing on the village green in a hierarchical society in which everyone knows and accepts their place. This paper discusses another, subversive and indeed critical, version of Englishness, a left-wing utopian vision of social transformation which was opposed to militarist macho imperialism and wanted Britain to transform its own self. A central figure in promoting this vision was Edward Carpenter. This paper examines his ideal of new forms of community which would promote both individual health and the health of society, along with the more gendered version of similar ideas put forward by his younger contemporary, Stella Browne. A liberated and egalitarian sexuality which respected individual diversity of desire, and did not have to be accommodated to indissoluble monogamous heterosexual marriage, was central to this vision. These ideas formed a persistent strain within the British labour movement as well as progressive movements more generally. Some of the problems with this idealistic view of human and social perfectibility will be discussed, but also its long-term influences. Dr Nick Harrison (French, UCL) Veils and Voices: Women, Nationalism and the Space of Literature (with reference to Assia Djebar) To be categorized as a postcolonial or minority writer is almost by definition to be approached in terms of voice. As various critics have pointed out, such writers find themselves placed in a field of reception where their (supposed) identity understood particularly in terms of nationality is taken as fundamental to the understanding of their writing. In this way they are placed under particular pressures to speak for their country or culture of origin. For various reasons, these pressures are especially acute for a writer such as Assia Djebar, a woman from a North African Muslim background. In her own words, critics turn to her for an image of Woman Algeria. This paper will examine the complicated ways in which her writing has responded to such pressures and expectations how, in other words, it has positioned itself in relation to its own field of reception. More specifically, I will consider

Djebars uses of autobiographical writing, and of a complex metaphorics of veiling to describe her own writing practice. On the face of it, autobiography is a paradigmatic instance of the sort of coming to voice which, in the eyes of some critics, transgresses those cultural traditions through which the veiled Algerian woman has been kept silent and anonymous. In Djebars work, however, one can see the emergence of a distinctly literary space wherein in transgression of critical expectations the veil may be the expression of individuality rather than its surrender, and literary voice may disguise identity (nationality, gender, sexuality) rather than capture it.

Dr Song Hwee Lim (East Asian Studies, Leeds) Transgender Imagination, Family Outing, and Diaspora of the Heart: Three Representational Tropes of Male Homosexuality in Chinese Cinemas of the 1990s This paper studies three tropes for the representation of male homosexuality in Chinese cinemas of the 1990s namely, transgender imagination, family outing, and diaspora of the heart. The identification of these three tropes is not meant to reify any essentialised notions about Chinese culture or society but to interrogate the relationship among gender, sexuality, and nation. In two films from China, Chen Kaiges Farewell My Concubine and Zhang Yuans East Palace, West Palace, the deployment of a feminine imagination in the tradition of transgender practice in Chinese opera as a trope for male homosexuality may reflect an appreciation of one form of same-sex relationships sustained from pre-modern times. In two Taiwanese films, Ang Lees The Wedding Banquet and Tsai Ming-liangs The River, the coming out of the homosexual characters can be seen as an attempt to destabilise the ideological construct of the family as well as conceptualise alternative formations of the family. In Wong Kar-wais Happy Together and Stanley Kwans Hold You Tight, two films from Hong Kong, the imminent return of the British colony to Communist China seems to result in not just physical emigration but also a diaspora of the heart, which impinges on the negotiation of homosexual identities and relationships. Besides delineating individually these three tropes as employed in these films grouped by region, I further complicate them by examining in turn the presence of one trope in a particular region against its absence in the other two regions, whilst situating my argument always within the intertwining matrices of gender, sexuality, and nation. Dr Cathie Lloyd (International Development Centre, Oxford) Women's Narratives of Nation: Algeria in the 1990s Dr Martin Mcquillan (Cultural Theory and Analysis) Between 'Algeriance' and 'Nostalgerie' Dr Richard Phillips (European Studies Research Institute, Salford) Race, Sex and Place: Sierra Leone in British Travel Writing

This paper examines recursive relationships between race and place, with reference to a place which held particular significance for the construction and transformation of race at a crucial time in imperial history -- Sierra Leone. In the transformation of race, places function in a number of ways, including as sites of contact and exchange where difference is made tangible, visible and negotiable, and as critical spaces in which it is materially and/or imaginatively possible to experiment with different social arrangements. Contact and difference come under the microscope most profoundly in intimate areas of social life, none more so than in the arena of potential and/or actual sexual contact. This paper examines the place of Sierra Leone -- as a site of contact and a critical space -- within the broader transformation of racial attitudes and race relations that accompanied the process of restructuring from saw imperialism move from slave to post-slave economies. Readings of extracts from four writers, drawn from different historical periods and illustrative of different political positions, reveal distinct forms of sexualised racial discourse. Variously, the writers expressed anxieties about miscegenation (Anna Maria Falconbridge), supported or opposed Britain's policies against slavery (Elizabeth Melville and Sir Richard Burton respectively), and critically repositioned difference (Graham Greene). Their accounts clarify some of the relationships that exist between race, sex and place, and help to explain how and why racial categories and relations tend to change. The direction of change may not always be liberatory, but the significance of geographical context with respect to change does clarify and signal the postcolonial potential for places as vehicles of generative social change. Prof Pam Pilbeam (History, Royal Holloway) A Waxen France: Madame Tussauds Representations of the French `You perceive that this is some sort of holy of holiest, the nearest Victorians got to a Cathedral, with its saints enniched within (1). The chief saint in Madame Tussauds exhibition was Bonaparte, the chief villains were Robespierre and his revolutionary colleagues. When she arrived in Britain in 1802 for a short tour that lasted until she died in 1850, her exhibition was an exploration of the evils of the French Revolution. She had modelled the guillotined revolutionaries, as well as Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, from their severed heads- and brought a model of a guillotine and the Bastille fortress to expose the short comings of the French. The British, busily at war with their nearest neighbour, loved this critical exposure. Later the focus of her collection became her `Shrine to Napoleon consisted of two rooms dedicated to the Emperor. Napoleon had always had a leading role in her touring company, but in 1834, when she was a well-established figure in the world of entertainment and about to open a permanent museum in Baker Street, Madame. Tussaud began to amass large quantities of Napoleonic memorabilia. She built up a collection which Napoleon III acknowledged, when he tried abortively to buy it from the Tussauds, to be the best in the world. Madame Tussauds presentation of French politics and history did much to inform and influence the popular perception of France among the British. This paper will explore that view and how it changed during the nineteenth century.
W.R.Titterton, London Scenes,1918.

Dr Jay Prosser (English, Leeds) Buddha Barthes: What Barthes Saw In Photography Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, his essay on photography, is not simply a dirge on the death of his mother. It is not simplyhis last work and posthumously translate in English a premonition of his own death. It is a small book that contains a new conception of deathin Barthes and offered to the West. The Buddhist tathata (thus-ness), translated by Barthes the perceiver into tathagata, 'thus-done' or 'the one who has become one with the sense of what is really so'is at root in what Barthes sees in photography, the Lacanian void, the real. Barthes's turn to Budhism at crucial points in Camera Lucida, and particularly in closing where he uses photography to criticize the place of death in Western society, is different from his playful embrace of Zen in Empire of Signs, which is wrongly conceived as orientalist but in which the Buddhist truths are rightly recognised as not felt. In the earlier book Barthes doesn't see the real and is still able to write it. In his last book he sees it in a photograph that stops his breath: 'nothing to say about the death of the one whom I love most.' In the context of the turn of other Western critical theorists to Eastern teachings in order to critique Western theories of absence and presence, of represenation, and particularly the mastery of narrating/imagining (Luce Irigaray's marriage of yoga and sexual difference in her recent Between East and West), this talk examines Barthes's turn to Buddhism and his ending with photography. I think about what Barthes loses in, and sees in the loss of, his mother. What did it meant that he lived with and loved his mother her whole life? Camera Lucida's thrnody places this relation outside of an Oedipal plot. Given that in the Buddhism that Barthes had been reading as he was writing Camera Lucida every being is a possible mother, Barthes's punctum in photography is to puncture the myth of the permanence and individuation of the Western self. The punctum of Cameria Lucida for us is that he doesn't simply write it but enacts it. Dr Tsila Ratner (Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL) Out of Place, Inside Time: The Relocation of Identities in Israeli Womens Writing Out of Place, Inside Time is the title of an essay by Ronit Matalon, the Israeli woman author of the novel The One Facing Us (1998). In the essay and the novel, Matalon explores and introduces new concepts of Israeli/Jewish identity, based on constant shifts of geographical and cultural locations. The hegemonic Zionist discourse aimed at forming a new Jewish society based on the uniformity of language, culture and geographical location. The vision of Israel as a melting pot was to transform a migrant society, shaped by exilic experiences, into a united national entity via the construction of a new and uniform Israeli/Jewish identity. This construction, characteristic to a nation-building narrative, called for the shedding of historical and cultural differences and was promoted by Israeli writers. Cracks in the consensus began to appear in the 60s, as writers voiced personal differences. Subsequent representations of The Israeli, although less homogenous, were assimilated into the hegemonic Zionist discourse. It was the writing of women that marked the significant shift towards a multi-layered view of identity constitution whose pluralism encompassed the individual and internal context as well as the wider social one. This new concept of Israeli

identity subverted the uni-vocal male narrative, allowing for marginalised cultural affiliations to surface. In the late 80s Eleonora Lev, by documenting her journey to Poland, presented the notion of an identity constituted of multi cultural layers. Her book A Certain Kind of Orphanhood (1989) records the retrieval of a suppressed identity through her travels in post-war Poland, the birthplace she left as a young child when her family emmigrated to Israel in the late fifties. Recovering primal memories, mainly of Polish as the mother tongue, reinstated a more complete identity which legitimised layers that were considered unfit and therefore had to be kept invisible. Levs book introduced mobile definitions of home and homeland, thus subverting the uncontested exile/nation-building dichotomy. Matalon has taken this notion of identity even further, replacing the territorial meaning of locations with that of political/cultural positions. Born in Israel to a family that came from Egypt, she advocates the multicultural and cosmopolitan nature of the Levant (the Mediterranean origin of the family). Her novel deconstructs main issues in the hegemonic Israeli narrative: the perception of migration and exile; the concept of geographical location; the boundaries of language; the way individuals define their place in the national space. The narrative styles and biographies of the two writers vary greatly. However, both writers share a need for the reconstitution of identities, based on diverse familial histories rather than on the linear and male formulation of national history. Once these particular histories have regained their visibility, they define alternative locations for Israeli/Jewish identities, which are still struggling for their place in the national space. Dr Hilary Robinson (School of Art and Design, University of Belfast) Towards Productive Female Genealogies: From Mother Ireland to the MotherDaughter Couple in Contemporary Irish Art At present, argues Luce Irigaray, 'we are still not born women.' (Irigaray 1993a: 66) We have not attained our full subjectivity, or found our syntax in the Symbolic; we struggle to achieve the creation of objects of mediation between ourselves. Women's genealogies (which I understand as the culture in an appropriate syntax passed from woman to woman through the generations) have been utterly disrupted by patriarchal social, sexual, legal, cultural, and religious structures; we have no sense of our potential for divinity, no appropriate transcendental, no universal which allows us an horizon towards which we can move. We see that this structure grants our mothers no respect, and without an horizon of possibilities leading us to do otherwise, we reproduce those structures. Mother to daughter, in a state of immediacy, we are not in position to become the subjects, women. In this paper I will follow through Irigaray's analysis of the structures necessary to allow us to become women and to re-assert woman-to-woman genealogies. I will do this through discussing women's genealogies in relation to the particular cultural, historical and political site of the island of Ireland. An initial discussion of representations of women in Irish myth and religion will outline how iconic representations of women in Ireland produce the function of the representation, 'woman', as being a cypher of nation, while reducing actual women, politically and empirically, to mothers. Drawing upon models found in Irigaray's

work, I will argue that we can read certain recent artworks by Irish women as re-traversing one site of exploitation in order to assert and mediate women's genealogies. Discussion of works by Pauline Cummins, Rita Duffy, Frances Hegarty and Louise Walsh will aim to make legible aspects of their work that produces different significations and meanings that work towards their becoming the subjects, Irish women.

Dr Amina Yaqin (South Asia, SOAS) Disrupting the Nation: Gendering Urdu Poetry
This paper will examine the idea of the imagined nation for the Muslims of India/ Pakistan as visualised in selected poems from Allama Mohammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. The chosen poems from these writers represent a selective yet significant phase in the development of a national imagining in verse, beginning with the pre-Partition reformist poetry of Iqbal, the progressive spirit of Faiz and culminating with the feminist voices of Riaz and Naheed. All four poets have notable public personae and have dealt with the themes of language, nationality and politics in their verse compositions. I wish to draw attention to the increasingly gendered sensibility of the nation as it developed in twentieth-century Urdu poetry. In particular I wish to retrace the reformist imagination of the nation as a cohesive body, but one unable to break free from religious discourse, the Progressive yearning for an untainted secular independence from colonial rule, and finally the feminist rejection of the patriarchal nation. Both Iqbal and Faizs poetry have had a great impact on the imagined community of Pakistan. While Iqbal is revered as the official poet-philosopher who imagined a separate state for the Muslims of India, and Faiz idealised as the Progressive conscience of the postcolonial nation of Pakistan, both poets operate within the patriarchal norms of Urdu poetry. Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed share the nationalistic concerns of Faiz and Iqbal but their verse formations and poetic voices depict a self-aware gendered language retrieved from the shackles of disempowerment.

3.

Sharp, Joanne P. "Gendering Nationhood: a feminist engagement with national identity." Bodyspace. Ed. Nancy Duncan. NY: Routledge, 1996. (nation formations and the importance of family as an ISA)-gendered constructions of nations and national citizens "...the nation is embodied within each man and each man comes to embody the nation. This is the horizontal fraternity to which Anderson refers.... Women are not equal to the nation but symbolic of it. Many nations are figuratively

female... In the national imaginary, women are mothers of the nation or vulnerable citizens to be protected."(99) East European Communist regime as an example: During the communist period, the primary division in society was not public/private per se but a division 'between public' (mendacious, ideological0 and private (dignified, truthful ) discourses'. 1. full employment, not a sign of liberation 2. family (free space) in contrast to the state-this tend to deflect attention away from power dynamics operating within the family. The present: 3. women are blamed for social problems. ...This attitude legitimates women's return to the domestic sphere ... Sharp's arguments:

radical democracy -plurality "the constant subversion and overdetermination of one [subject position] by the others" (Mouffe) The creation of the appearance of [national] unity is only possible through struggle, ..a contest between gendered identities. "not simply a case of men versus women, but instead a recognition of the pressures and divisions which arise from employing gender to fashion a national community in somebody's, but not everybody's image"Enloe. the domestic: not only a space of the containment of women; it is in certain places [e.g. some East European nation] a site of resistance against state requirements for labour, and a space of radical politics aiming to transcend the status quo Sylvia Walby. "Woman and Nation." Mapping the Nation. Ed. Gopal Balakrishnan, Introd. Benedict Anderson. NY: Verso, 1996: 235-55. -differential integration/involvement of women into national projects (p. 235-36)citizenship/ethnic/national/'race' relations--gender a. b. c. d. / e. (p. 236)-Anthias and Yuval-Davis a. as biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities- b. as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups; racial identity c. as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture; national identity

d. as signifiers of ethnic/national differences-as a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic/national categories; e. as participants in national, economical, political and military struggles . [1. Emphasis placed on cultural and ideological levels, labour 2. class and other forms of social hierarchy - Walby differential involvement of women in national projects ] C. Jayawardena-important feminist components of nationalist movements in Third World countries 1. feminist and nationalist movements were closely interconnected, 2. They cannot be understood outside of an understanding of imperialism and both local and international capitalism. P. 240 D. Enloe-gender and the relations between nations e.g. sex tourism, Third World women as cheap labour Walby's main arguments: --national projects: some as gender projects (e.g. for democracy, legitimacy, for women's interests) --nationalism, militarism and gender-Women's peace movements and internationalism. Transnational projects: e.g. EEC and equal opportunities legislation; feminism = Western feminism? p. 252 --spatial ordering of gender-women's political activities are more local than men's, less nationalist.
En-gendering India: woman and nation in colonial and postcolonial narratives By Sangeeta Ray Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family

In her article, Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family(1993), Anne McClintock, the Simone de Beauvoir Chair of English and Womens Studies at the University of Wisconsin, analyzes womens position in the societies establishing a link with the notions including, nation, nationalism, race and gender. Her groundbreaking study is Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995) that serves as a good work for colonial and post-colonial studies. In her article Race/ Class/ Gender Ideology in Guatemala: Modern and Anti-Modern Forms, Carol Smith, who is a professor in the Anthropology Department of University of California, aims to analyze why women rather than men serve as the symbols of the ethnic groups in previously colonized places like Guatemala. In this sense, both articles attempt to evaluate womens

representation as markers of differences in the society. McClintock successfully reviews the literature, which serves as a good start to convince the reader that nationalism is constituted from the very beginning as gendered. Referring to many authors, she justifies her own position and proves that in order to understand colonialism and post-colonialism, it is necessary to accept that the notions; race, gender and class do not exist in isolation from each other, but they are closely linked in conflictual and contradictory ways. She puts emphasis on the family trope that has two components as social hierarchy and historical change. Thus, womens subordination to men comes into scene again. As shown in the U.S. citizenship issue in Stevens article On the Marriage Question, we see that it is not only limited with U.S. but also in the history of European countries the marriage remains as a prerequisite to the citizenship of a woman. She points out that the relationship between race, gender and nationalism can be seen in the British colonization of South Africa, in which white middle class men were seen as the agency of national progress, whereas women were seen as the anachronistic humans. The difference between the black and white women was apparent that black women held the lowest position on the society. Also, McClintock puts much emphasis on the symbolic figures, fetishist objects like flags, uniforms, maps and so on, as well as the womens symbolic position against male fetish rituals of national spectacle(1993: 71). In both Afrikaan and African nationalism, womens political identity remained supportive and auxiliary and their political agency considered in the ideology of motherhood. McClintock concludes that a gendered division of national creation prevailed in the sense that men considered to be in political and economic realm whereas women remain in the moral and spiritual realm as the keepers of the tradition. The nineteenth century was a period of colonial expansion and the colonies brought with them new definitions of masculinity and race with a subsequent impact on gender roles. Although both articles serve for the same purpose as attempting to show the womens undermined position regarding the nationalist objectives of previously colonized countries as well as with the race, class and gender perceptions, Smiths article remains more specifically focused. Similarly, Smith also points out that the systems of race, class and gender became more interlinked and mutually reinforcing as a result of capitalism and the expansion of Western culture. Emphasizing the ideological links between race, gender and class in the West with the Foucaldian term of symbolics of blood where blood remains as the main signifier of a social status in the society, she basically concentrates on the Guatemalan society which is colonized by the Spanish. Smith identifies three classes in Guatemala, including, Guatemalan elites, Guatemalan Ladinos and Maya communities. She proves that the perception of sexuality is class based and race is defined through culture rather than descent. Using both her own ethnographic work and also other anthropologists, Smith proves that Maya women are freer than the other women in the Guatemalan society. Mayas were alienated from the society with their own culture specific to them and they maintained a seperatist, cultural and political stance against the Ladino Nation who accept the hegemony of capitalism and corrupt regime of Guatemala which Ladinos controlled. However their revolutionary politics remained not enough in the sense that many of them were chased over from their homes with the consent of Ladinos. It is a well-known fact that people want to feel the sense of belonging to a wider community that finds itself in nation although its definition remains controversial. It is important to take into consideration the relation between the concepts like, nation, national identity, gender,

race and the effects of nationalism on the construction of gender roles. McClintock and Smith, both concentrate on the symbolic constructions of nation and how men and women in these national communities are affected from them. They both claim that the terms like nation and nationalism are highly gendered marking women as the symbolic values of nations. McClintock focuses on South Africa, giving the competing Afrikaner and African nationalisms as examples of how nationalism is genderized emphasizing the relation between nationalism and feminism, whereas Smith focuses on the impact of nationalism and colonialism on race, gender and class perceptions in Guatemala. The fieldworks are very important to show the theory in practice, especially to understand the claims of both authors, and in this sense they prove everything they claim. PROJECT DESCRIPTION The Gender and Nation research project studies a variety of case studies from around the world in order to map and theorize intersections between gender and nation, explore different outcomes of those intersections and identify the conditions that promote peaceful, women-friendly forms of national projects. The goal is to gather ninety case studies from about thirty countries. The project involves macroanalysis. That is to say, project members are not conducting primary research at this stage. Rather, members gather, analyze and synthesize existing case studies from different periods and perspectives to identify the major hypotheses about gender/nation relations and test them' in a preliminary way. The project involves two research areas linked by demonstrating that gender is significant to understanding nationalism, and that nationalism and nation-building should be reassessed by feminist scholars because they can provide opportunities for women to achieve gender justice. These two areas will make a significant and original contribution by reframing discussion concerning gender and nationalism. They will also develop and operationalize the concepts of gender valence and gender justice to help assess the openness of feminisms and nationalisms to affiliation. The research maps women's involvements in nationalist mobilizations and nation-state building in these contexts: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Euro-American core/first-wave nation-states; *National projects in marginal, western' nation-states; Modernizing, anti-colonial national projects; National projects in post-colonial states; National projects in white settler' societies;

6. Anti-modern, anti-imperialist national projects; 7. 'Nations without states' or with quasi or pseudo-states. *The project uses Yuval-Davis' national projects' to encompass nationalisms and national movements in different contexts and performing different political roles within and outside the state. National projects change over time and multiple projects may be in conflict/competition in any period. The focus of the project is on how gender arrangements relate to national projects and how gender/nation relations change. In the analysis, interactions between gender and nation are mapped over time to explore gender relations in the origins, formation and development of nations. As well, the analyses explore how relations between gender and nation are manifested in nationalist movements, ideologies and nation-building and are linked to states. The second area involves assessments of the gender valence of specific nationalisms: that is, the relative openness of movements, ideologies, institutions and processes to women's participation and goals; and the relative openness of women's movements and feminist ideologies to affiliation with national projects. The research draws on three areas of the existing literature: mainstream texts on nationalism; post-colonial research on women's experiences in modernizing, anti-colonial and settler-society nationalism and nation-building; and feminist texts, especially those discussing whether nationalism is positive or negative for women. One goal of this research is to contest the belief of mainstream theorists that gender is irrelevant to understanding nationalism. The larger purpose is to compare accounts of gender/nation relations to understand reasons for the diversity of gender/nation relations and why national projects have negative and positive consequences for women. The comparative and historical approach has the objective of locating and theorizing the factors that open nationalism and nation-state building to women's involvement, as well as the factors that open women's activism to the national project. Sluga, Glenda, "Identity, gender, and the history of European nations and nationalisms" in Nations and Nationalism, vol.4, no.1, pp.87-111. Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986.

Viroli, Maurizio. For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995.
Reviewed by Tom Donahue, University of Chicago. Maurizio Viroli is admirably forthright about what he believes is the proper task of students of nationality: "Instead of aiming at forging scientific definitions of the nature of patriotism and nationalism, we should aim at understanding what scholars, agitators, poets, and prophets have meant when they spoke of love of country" (4-5). It is, Viroli thinks, the tunnel-vision emphasis on causal and external approaches to nationalism studies that has led scholars to confuse, conflate, and generally elide the distinction between patriotism and nationalism. He contends that it is only from an internal, hermeneutic point of view that we can grasp the difference between these two types of nation-thinking. Obviously, this complaint would be irrelevant if the difference in question was unimportant, but Viroli argues with passion and skill that it is of great (indeed, of terrible) importance. This importance is made manifest, Viroli claims, by consideration of the effects of the core values propagated by patriot-writers and nationalist-writers: "for the patriots, the primary value is the republic and the free way of life that the republic permits; for the nationalists, the primary values are the spiritual and cultural unity of the people. In the writings of the founders of modern nationalism, the republic is either repudiated or regarded as an issue of secondary importance. Patriots and nationalists haveendeavoured to instil or strengthen in us different types of love: a charitable and generous love in the case of patriotism, an unconditional loyalty or an exclusive attachment in the case of the nationalists" (2). The issue, then, is one of political freedom. Viroli holds that the effect of patriot values is to promote the republic (which in Virolis calculus is the sole vehicle for political freedom) and at the same time to make us charitable persons. The effect of nationalist values, by contrast, is to downgrade the status of the republic, and to rid us of caritascharity for our fellow humans by instilling in us a univocal loyalty to the nation. Hence, nationalist values attenuate (and possibly, in the end, abolish) political freedom. Now, Virolis analysis of the distinction is of course a good deal more nuanced than this. He recognizes that "patriotism has also meant loyalty to the monarch and the language of patriotism has also been used to oppress, discriminate, and conquer, while the ideal of the nation and the cultural and spiritual unity of a people have been invoked to sustain struggles for unity" (2). But I think that the account given above fairly represents (excepting perhaps the use of the term "political freedom," which I havent the space to define) his views of the question and the political commitments that drive him to it. Consider this further elaboration: Properly understood, the language of republican patriotism could serve as a powerful antidote to nationalism. Like the language of nationalism it is eminently rhetorical; it aims at resuscitating, strengthening, and directing the passions of a particular people with a specific cultural and historical identity rather than at attaining the reasoned approval of impersonal rational agents. It endeavors to reinforce bonds, such love [sic] of the common liberty of a people, which are as particularistic as the love of, or pride in, the cultural

tradition or the shared destiny of a people. Precisely because it competes with nationalism on the same terrain of passions and particularity and uses rhetorical rather than purely rational arguments, patriotism is a formidable opponent of nationalism. It works on bonds of solidarity and fellowship that like feels toward like to transmute them into forces that sustain liberty rather instead of fomenting exclusion or aggression (8). The syllogism that underpins this argument seems to go as follows: affect will often triumph over reason in political affairs; patriotism is a far less dangerous form of affect than is nationalism; therefore, political communities ought to try to instill patriotism in their members. The project Viroli proposes, then, is one of making affect safe for political freedom, as the following passage makes clear: To move our compatriots to commit themselves to the common liberty of their people [we] have to appeal to feelings of compassion and solidarity that arewhen they arerooted in bonds of language, culture, and history. The work to be done is to translate these bonds into love of common liberty. To make this alchemy of passions possible we surely need moral arguments that appeal to reason and interests, but we must also be able to resort, as good rhetoricians do, to stories, images, and visions (10). "Alchemy of passions" is not a bad piece of rhetoric itself, an observation that I think reveals a possible flaw in Virolis argument. Arent "stories, images, and visions" indispensable tools of reasoning, as well as tools of rhetoric? Is reason merely the calculus of interests and discrete units of happiness? But if Virolis distinction between reason and affect is not drawn as sharply as it might be, his historical analysisan erudite critique and review, stretching from Republican Rome to the time of Giuseppe Mazzini and Ernest Renan, of the history of patriotic writings and their eventual, partial cooptation by nationalismis acute and cogently argued. Viroli is unusually attentive to the histories of words and concepts; he appreciates the normative force that accrues to them as theylike snowballs gathering mass as they rollacquire ever more associations and meanings. My main criticism (albeit that may be too strong a word) of the book is that it does not reach a question which I think its aims require it to answer. Viroli believes that we should embrace a contemporary patriotic republicanism. But if so, how should our modern stress on freedom of the individual mesh with the tradition of patriotic republicanism? Is there a tension between his conception of "common liberty" and freedom of the individual? More to the point, what should be our reaction to Horaces famous line (which the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen bitterly repudiated while serving in the trenches in the First World War) that "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" ("Sweet and honorable it is to die for ones fatherland")? Viroli paraphrases this most patriotic of sayings (without attribution) when glossing Herder, but he does notso far as I can seespeak to the question of where it leaves the "common liberty" that he cherishes.

Gender, nation, and globalization in Monsoon Wedding and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.(Critical essay)
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
| June 22, 2005 | Sharpe, Jenny | COPYRIGHT 2004 The crossover success of Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding (2001), whose characters speak English, Hindi, and Punjabi, lies in the skill with which the film acquaints a Western audience with the sights and sounds of the new global India. Set in a burgeoning New Delhi suburb, the film uses a lavish Punjabi wedding as an occasion for staging the reunion of family members who are scattered across the globe. But the idea of a global India does not simply refer to the large numbers of Indians (known as Non-Resident Indians or NRIs) living in the diaspora. (1) The term also signifies the social and cultural transformation India has undergone since 1991, when a new economic policy eliminated the bureaucratic red tape restricting imports and foreign investment. For the first time, the marketplace became flooded with consumer goods that had previously been available only on the black market, and designer labels became commonplace. Indian television went from the two channels of the state TV to the more than sixty channels available on cable and satellite in some urban areas. Whereas the state-controlled television programming promoted agricultural shows aimed at farmers, the new satellite TV channels broadcast sexually explicit music videos and Hollywood soap operas such as Santa Barbara and Baywatch that engendered indian imitations. Sexual topics that were previously unmentionable were now being openly discussed, and television brought these discussions into the inner sanctum of the home. Monsoon Wedding presents the contradictions of everyday life that an opening of India to globalization has introduced. The film destroys any lingering image of a nation mired in some premodern space as a traditional land with ancient customs and beliefs. Rather, it reveals a postmodern world in which cell phones and e-mail coexist with age-old rituals and occupations. (2) The audience witnesses Delhi street scenes of pushcarts and bicycle rickshaws weaving in and out of cars driving by a monolithic statue of Shiva. (3) Golfers ride in golf carts across an immaculately landscaped golf course, while a row of women carrying sand in baskets on their heads (presumably for the sand pits) passes behind them. The camera often zooms in on television screens and monitors to emphasize the power of the new media, and it presents a TV talk show on film censorship, where guests debate the erosion of Indian morality and Hindu tradition. The heroine, Aditi (Vasundhara Das), represents a new generation of Indian women who live double lives in order to reconcile their desires with the wishes of their parents. Aditi secretly meets the man she loves the night before she is to marry the Houston NRI her parents have arranged for her to marry. In foregrounding the clash of modernity and tradition, Nair makes explicit the anxieties about a national identity underlying the commercially successful films of Indian cinema,

commonly known as Bollywood in reference to Bombay as the Hollywood of the Indian film industry. (4) A hybrid form from its inception, Bombay cinema reworked the melodrama, musical, slapstick comedy, and gangster genres of the classic Hollywood era, by infusing them with Hindu epic plots, Orientalist exoticism, and the visual and aural overload of Indian culture to create a new aesthetic style. Once derided for its melodrama and derivative plots, Bollywood has more recently begun to infiltrate a Euro-American consciousness through what can be identified as a new transnational cultural literacy. Indian films have always enjoyed an international audience, being popular among Arabs, Africans, Mexicans, and Southeast Asians. Indian film stars such as Raj Kapoor had an enormous following in third world countries as well as the former Soviet Union, where loyal fans equally consumed the visual spectacle of his movies as his depiction of the angst of the common man. What is different today is that a Bollywood audience has expanded to include Western populations, while its cinematic style has been mainstreamed into British and American theater, film, and television. (5) Bollywood's crossover success can be attributed to the increased availability of Indian films on DVD, cable TV, and in theaters catering to South Asians living in the diaspora. But it is also an indication of how Indian films are becoming more global in appearance. Glossy, high budget films shot on location in Europe and the United States and influenced by the slick cinematography of commercials are far removed from the feudal village drama of the 1950s and 1960s belonging to the golden age of Indian cinema. The story, of the strength and courage of a peasant woman to overcome debt bondage in a classic postindependence film such as Mehboob's Mother India (1957) served as an allegory for the heroic effort of the Indian nation to achieve self-sufficiency through modernization. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a shift to action films featuring the angry young man who embodied the triumph of India's underclasses over social injustice and political corruption. (6) The commercially successful films made since the mid-1990s, in contrast, emphasize wealth, fast cars, youth culture, and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Moreover, the folk-inspired song-and-dance sequences that were standard Bollywood fare have been replaced with a hip-hop style, Michael Jackson-inspired choreography, accompanied by the rapid editing and unconventional camera angles of MTV music videos--all appropriately "Indianized." The rural exists in the post-1990s films not as a geographical location so much as a signifier for a simpler way of life prior to globalization. As a member of the new generation of directors declares: "The village has been pushed to the farthest periphery of our imagination. Any reference to a rural background today is only a synthetic nod to the roots. The insistence is on gloss" (cited in Chopra 1997). Instead of the folkloric scenes belonging to earlier generations of films, the rural is emptied of the culture of everyday life. The most successful genre to deploy the new cinematic style is the family melodrama, which was the most popular genre of the 1990s. (7) Instead of featuring India's underclasses as did earlier generations of films, the 1990s melodrama centers on wealthy Indian families with traditional values. These big-budget films, often shot on location in Europe and the United States, present "endless rounds of parties, beach dances, wedding celebrations, festive occasions, and an all-round feeling of well-being" (Kripalani 2001,

45). Films such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun ...! (What am I to you! 1994); Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The brave-hearted will take the bride, 1995); Pardes (Foreign land, 1997); and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is happening, 1998) allow their audiences to share in the extravagant lifestyles of the elite classes and cross the threshold of their luxurious homes, whether Western-style mansions or traditional havelis. Instead of the class conflict that dominated the angry young man films of the prior two decades, the conflict staged in these films is between modernity and tradition. (8) The 1990s family melodrama endorses traditional values through its staging of elaborate northern Indian marriage ceremonies and by making the joint family into the locus of the nation at a moment in time when the nuclear family was replacing the extended family among india's middle class (Uberoi 2001). The indebtedness of Monsoon Wedding to this genre of Bollywood film is unmistakable in its integration of song-and-dance sequences into the storyline, its indulgence in the rich culture of Punjabi weddings, and its tribute to the extended family. (9) In addition, through the shared knowledge its characters have of songs from popular Hindi films, Nair's film dramatizes how a commercialized, hybridized, and low cultural form such as Bombay cinema operates as the site of a collective Indian identity throughout the diaspora. (10) But even as Nair integrates a Bollywood aesthetic into her film, she is critical of the rosy picture presented in its family dramas. Made under the aegis of her New York--based company, Mirabai Films, Monsoon Wedding moves fluidly from happy family reunion scenes to sexually intimate ones, and it weaves into its wedding motif the disturbing topic of sexual molestation--a subject too controversial for popular Indian cinema. Inasmuch as Nair eschews the glossy patina of blockbuster Bollywood films in favor of a documentary cinematic style by shooting with a handheld Super 16 camera, she merges the realism of American independent filmmaking with Bollywood's narrative style. Still, Monsoon Wedding was not only successful in Britain and the United States but in India as well, at least among its urban middle class. Its celebration of the Indian family aligns it more closely with the 1990s Bollywood blockbusters than its maverick approach to questions of female sexuality might lead one to suspect. Nair reinvents even as she reproduces the lavish Punjabi wedding film that Yash Chopra popularized and that experienced a comeback with the success of Hum Aapke Hain Koun ...! and Yash Chopra and Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Who Makes a Nation: An Examination of Nationalism, Gender, and Membership in the Nation, By Kelly J. Bel Nationalism is defined by Merriam-Websters dictionary as, loyalty and devotion to a nation; especially: a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups (nationalism, 2009). Nationalism is an ideology that focuses both on loyalty to and pride in ones nation. It can be as obvious as saying the pledge of allegiance every morning in school or more subtle, like Stetson Colognes use of national football star Tom Brady to promote their new product line. Nationalism, at its core, instills a belief in citizens that their country is important and superior to other countries, and that their individual identity is strongly tied to their homeland.

The end of the era of colonization has led to a rise in nationalism throughout the world. Sita Ranchod-Nilsson and Mary Ann Tetreault comment on this in the chapter, Gender and nationalism: The collapse of old political frameworks and the reconfiguration of global economic power have been accompanied by an impulse to redefine, reassert, and reconfigure meanings of the nation on multiple levels (p 1, Ranchod-Nilsson & Tetreault, 2000). As colonial powers have begun retracting from countries they once imperialized, citizens of those countries have been given the opportunity to once again define their nation as they perceive it, rather than accept the definitions imposed on them by other powers. Nationalism has also been used as a tool by imperialized people to topple the foreign regimes that control them. The most successful anti-colonization movements have had nationalistic motivations. The Indian Nationalist Movement serves as an example of this. Under the leadership of Ghandi, Indians developed a nationalist pride that motivated them to demand sovereignty from Britain (Indian nationalist movement, 2008). Citizens of a nation are most willing to fight for their countrys independence from colonial powers if they have pride in their nation, believing their nation is important and superior to the powers colonizing it, and if they feel defined in some way by the land in which they live. Nationalistic movements are often tied to the land, giving natives of the land an advantage over foreigners. Gender, especially womanhood, is often defined in regards to the nation. Ranchod-Nilsson and Tetreault write: The centrality of gender to resurgent nationalist forces and discourses continues to be striking (p 1, Ranchod-Nilsson & Tetreault, 2000). Each nation assigns gender roles to its citizens. In Western nations men are assigned the roles of protector and laborer, whereas women are assigned the roles of mother and homemaker. By defining roles for women and men, nationalism also denies the existence of a gender identity outside the traditional male or female. Intersexed individuals have no gender role, i.e. no designated role to play in the nation. Evidence of how nationalism and cultural norms define gender roles can be found by examining the role of colonization on gender. Maria Lugones examines several examples in her essay, Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System (2000). One example she gives is the Yoruba society. Before the Yoruba people were colonized by the west, gender was not used as a social organizing tool. As Lugones writes: Oyewumi understands gender as introduced by the West as a tool of domination that designates two binarily opposed and hierarchical social categories Women are defined in relation to men, the norm. Women are those who do not have a penis; those who do not have power; those who cannot participate in the public arena. None of this was true of Yoruba anafemales prior to colonization (p 17, Lugones, 2007). Lugones explains that before colonization, women and men were not viewed as separate social categories and each took equal part in society and government. When society was colonized, the categories of male and female were created and females were excluded from the public arena.

Another example Lugones gives regards Cherokee society prior to colonization. In colonization of the Cherokee, gender roles were used as a tool to aid imperialization. She writes, The white colonizer constructed a powerful inside force as colonized men were co-opted into patriarchal roles The British took Cherokee men to England and gave them an education in the ways of the English Cherokee women lost all these powers and rights, as the Cherokee were removed and patriarchal arrangements were introduced. (p 21, Lugones, 2007). By creating gender roles that gave men power over women, the colonizers earned the support and cooperation of the societys men, making it easier to imperialize them. The aforementioned examples of gender hierarchies being used as a tool of colonization show the power that cultural norms have in defining who are and who are not members of the state. Women are often denied privileges of citizenship, like voting and the right to participate in government, excluding them from being full members of the state. Racial minority groups have also been historically denied these privileges. Zillah Einstein discusses this in her chapter, Writing bodies on the nation for the globe: A nation is defined by its unity; differences and particularities within it challenge its universality. Shared commonness is privileged against diversity, which is problemized as disorderly (p 37, Ranchod-Nilsson & Tetreault, 2000). Nationalism, she says, becomes a form of racism, as one must have ancestral roots to the nation to truly be a member of it. Many nationalist movements serve as examples of this. Einstein writes, Serb nationalists specify their racial blood as formative of the nation, much like Hitler defined Germany by Aryan blood (p 39, Ranchod-Nilsson & Tetreault, 2000). Maria Lugones notes that minority women are often hit hardest of all: It is part of their history that only white bourgeois women have consistently counted as women so described in the West. Females excluded from that description were understood as animals in the deep sense of without gender, sexually marked as female, but without the characteristics of femininity (p 26, Lugones, 2007). Lacking the necessary feminine qualities, women of color are denied any privileges afforded to white women. Lugones explains, Colonized females got the inferior status of gendering as women, without any of the privileges accompanying that status for white bourgeois women (p 27, Lugones, 2007). While women have historically been excluded from national membership, they have often fought back. The film If Hope Were Enough, chronicles the role of women in the development of an International Criminal Court. The film emphasizes the importance of women working together to ensure that the International Criminal Court is used to prosecute international violations of womens rights. (Women's Caucus for Gender Justice & Witness, 2000). Groups such as the Womens Initiatives for Gender Justice have had some success in bringing crimes against women under the jurisdiction of international law. As of 2008, the International Criminal Court explicitly recognizes rape, sexual slavery,

enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization or any other form of sexual violence as war crimes in international and non-international armed conflict as well as crimes against humanity (p 36, Inder, Tourell, Orlovsky, & Serra, 2008). Women must work together to fight the structures of power that oppress them, while remaining aware of the oppressive nature of nationalism itself. Women should not fight solely for womens rights, but for rights of all members of the nation and international protection for citizens of all nations. I nder, B., Tourell, D. E., Orlovsky, K., & Serra, V. (2008). Gender report card 2008 on the international criminal court. The Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice. "Indian Nationalist Movement," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2008 http://uk.encarta.msn.com 1997-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the colonial /Modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186-209. nationalism. (2009). In Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Retrieved March 16, 2009, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationalism Ranchod-Nilsson, S., & Tetreault, M. A. (Eds.). (2000). Women, states and nationalism. New York, New York: Routledge. Women's Caucus for Gender Justice, & Witness. (2000). If hope were enough. New York: The Caucus.

The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830.
Canadian Journal of History, 2007 by Stephen Miller Summary: Reviews the book "The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830," by Jennifer Ngaire Heuer. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer's book, a study of French citizenship between 1789 and 1830, demonstrates that in the first years of the Revolution at least until Thermidor political leaders saw women as members of the national community whose first loyalty was to the fatherland rather than to the male heads of households. This finding challenges the line of reasoning, advanced in recent scholarship, that the Revolution excluded women from politics more thoroughly than had the old regime monarchy.

The book's key evidence is the interpretation by legislators and judges of the act of emigration. It is well known that the national representative bodies enacted punitive laws against those who left France between 1791 and 1793. The laws expropriated the migrs' property, permanently banished them from the country, and withdrew all attributes of their legal identity in France. But as Heuer points out, judges could not easily apply these laws, because some of the people who left the country did not qualify as counter-revolutionary nobles and did not necessarily deserve to be penalized. Many women claimed that the nation did not permit them to light for their country or hold public office. It only demanded fiscal contributions from women. Surely the nation should not punish women for carrying out their conjugal duties by following their husbands into exile, especially when they went to countries that were not at war with France. Legislators, however, regarded women and children as members of the national family whose duty it was to support their fatherland, help enforce its laws, and denounce those who did not. The legislators deemed that a woman's first allegiance should be to the national family rather than to their husbands or fathers. Judges assessed women according to their actions rather than according to their gender. This reasoning of the judges and legislators takes on special significance when Heuer sets it against the reasoning of their contemporaries in the emergent United States of America. Women who followed their husbands to the Loyalist side succeeded in convincing the American authorities that they committed no crime in submitting to their husbands and should not be stripped of property in ' the new nation. They could even have the authorities grant them safe passage to the Loyalist side to rejoin their husbands. Heuer's study leads to the conclusion that popular involvement in politics went hand in hand with women's rights. She points out that women formed political clubs and participated in sectional societies, that divorcees and widows attended electoral assemblies in 1793, and that some of the revolutionary turning points resulted from women's leadership of the great days or journes. Given the women's political engagement in the social movements of the Revolution, the authorities, Heuer suggests, could not help but perceive them as constituents of the national community even if the authorities did not accord them the right to vote or to hold office. Gender and nationalism: the masculinization of hinduism and female political participation in india Sikata Banerjee Department of Women's Studies, University of Victoria, P.O. 3045, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3P4

Gendered Nationalism, the Colonial Narrative, and the Rhetorical Significance of the Mother India Controversy
Authors: Marouf Hasian Jr. - Marouf Hasian, Jr. (PhD, University of Georgia, 1993) is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.a; Anne Bialowas - Anne Bialowas (PhD, University of Utah, 2009) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Weber State University, Ogden, Utah.b

Abstract
The controversies surrounding Katherine Mayo's (1927) Mother India provides an exploration into the rhetorical dynamics of figurations that helped maintain imperial aspirations. This analysis suggests that many of the American, British, and Indian commentators who wrote about the impact of Mother India were not just making observations about the accuracy of Mayo's personal observations or the fairness of her religious characterizations; rather, these observers were often participants in much larger discursive debates about what might be called gendered nationalismthe use of paternalistic figurations that suture together particular familiar images with political critiques of oppositional movements.
Genders 34 2001

Passionate Fictions
Horizons of the Exotic and Colonial Self-Fashioning in Mircea Eliade's Bengal Nights and Maitreyi Devi's Na Hanyate by SRIPARNA BASU [1] One desires the archaic and the exotic insofar as it remains the other, but insofar as it retains its ontological difference the encounter with it is liable to be marked by frustration, failure, lack. Narratives with a colonial setting are often marked by such a structure; E.M. Forster's A Passage to India may be taken as a paradigmatic narrative of this class. Passages to India are often passages into the unconscious, a site of covert desire which could reveal a secret of the Western self not apparent or available to it. A structuring principle of such texts is that the other is denied a speaking part, and registers itself as an absence. The desire/ fear of the exoticized other and the cloaked violence around this issue in Forster's text receives more direct expression in Bengal Nights, Mircea Eliade's romance with a colonial Indian setting.

[2] What is most remarkable in the case of Bengal Nights, however, is that Maitreyi Devi, the protoype for the heroine of Eliade's novel and the figure in whom Eliade sums up the otherness and enigma of the East, wrote her own version of this romantic encounter in response to what she perceived as her misrepresentation in Eliade's exoticizing fiction. Maitreyi's critique shows up Eliade's narrative of heterosexual romance with her as a disguise for a more primary homosocial relationship that he formed with Surendranath Dasgupta, Maitreyi's father and Eliade's mentor during his trip to India. In responding to Eliade's fiction, Maitreyi draws on archetypes of Indian cultural nationalism, also structured by a trope of discovery or recovery of submerged aspects of self. Reading her Bengali novel Na Hanyate alongside Eliade's versions of the encounter poses fascinating questions not only of intertextuality and of literary mediations of "real" characters or events, but also of the erotics of the East/ West encounter and of the Indian woman writing back from within a script of cultural nationalism to her representation in an exoticizing fiction. [3] Sara Suleri has suggested that narratives of imperialism and Indian nationalism are both implicated in the structure of romance: a claim [has been made] for the antecedent of imperialism in the construction of British national identity; I make a parallel claim for the autonomy of a similar Indian establishment of nation, but further wish to suggest that both modes of cultural arrival are implicated in the structure of romance, causing their stories to achieve an idea of nation only after dislocation and disbandment have demanded a requisite cost (Suleri, 10). Building on Suleri's suggestive and fertile hypothesis, I wish to emphasize simultaneously the autonomy and agency of Indian nationalist discourse, and its mutual imbrication and dialogic relation with Orientalism, which it subjects to effects of strategic appropriation, reversal and displacement. Suleri, however, does not quite address the intricate arena of Indian nationalist discourse in its reciprocal transactions with narratives of Orientalism, and devotes her critical attention exclusively to the work of imperial writers, or postcolonial migrants writing in English, such as V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Reading Eliade's texts of romantic encounter alongside Maitreyi's Bengali text allows us to examine, in an instance of actual historical encounter, how these two sets of narratives relate to each other, the dense networks of affiliation and allusion as well as difference and critique which exist between them. [4] Bengal Nights, first published as Maitreyi in Eliade's native Romanian in 1933, proved to be the sensation of the Romanian literary world of that year and went through seven editions over the next ten years (Ricketts, 1:536-37). The naming of the novel and its heroine after Maitreyi is an indication of how closely based the novel is on certain events which occurred in Calcutta in 1930 involving Eliade and Maitreyi. Eliade worked on his doctoral dissertation on Yoga under the tutelage of Surendranath Dasgupta, professor of philosophy at Calcutta University. He also

stayed at the Dasgupta residence, where he grew acquainted with Maitreyi. As a young girl, Maitreyi attracted attention as a successful poet and was one of the first women pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at the university. Later she was to become well known in Bengal as a poet, intellectual, social activist and disciple of Rabindranath Tagore. News of Eliade's novel gradually filtered to Maitreyi in Calcutta through Le Nuit Bengali, the French translation of Maitreyi which was published in 1950. Maitreyi felt offended by the novel dedicated to her; she made repeated attempts to get in touch with Eliade which he rebuffed until one morning in April 1973 when Maitreyi walked into his office at the University of Chicago. Na Hanyate, published in 1974, is based on Maitreyi's experiences with Eliade from 1930 to 1973. In Other Worlds [5] While Eliade's scholarly work in the history of religions as well as his enunciation of a "new humanist" mode of inquiry in anthropological hermeneutics has attracted considerable notice and been a focus of debate and controversy (Dudley), very little attention has been paid to his fictional and autobiographical writings, particularly to Bengal Nights. Some critics have pointed to the importance of his literary work for a comprehensive understanding of his scholarly projects, but they have foregrounded chiefly the category of "imagination" at work across Eliade's writings (Girardot and Ricketts). While apprehending him as an aesthete and mystic, they rarely discuss his literary productions in relation to his autobiographical writings, or consider the politics of gender, race and colony that marks his literary and scholarly oeuvres. Bengal Nights, one of his most significant works of fiction based on biographical events, never comes up for sustained critical analysis. [6] While "new humanism" exists as a key paradigm throughout Eliade's scholarly work, it is also integral to an understanding of his fiction, as I will show in my reading of Bengal Nights. In Eliade's version of it, the new humanist approach emerges through a hermeneutic of engagement and calls for a broad assimilation of religio-cultural experiences across space and time ("History of Religions," The Quest). Even though Eliade stresses the importance of dialogue with the other and opening up humanism to mankind's religious pasts, his message pertains more to the fascination and challenge the other poses to the spirit of discovery of the West: It is not beyond possibility that the discoveries and "encounters" made possible by the progress of the history of religions may have repercussions comparable to those of certain famous discoveries in the past of western culture. We have in mind the discovery of the exotic and primitive arts, which revivified modern Western aesthetics. We have in mind especially the discovery of the unconscious by psychoanalysis ... in both cases alike, there was a meeting with the "foreign," the unknown, with what cannot be reduced to familiar

categories -- in short, with the "wholly other." ... The "world" in which preanalytic man lived became obsolete after Freud's discoveries. But these "destructions" opened new vistas to Western creative genius (The Quest, 3). Encounters with other cultures here have a status comparable to "famous discoveries" of "Western culture," and figure ultimately as episodes within the latter's modernist reinvention of itself. Eliade's perception of the relationship between the other and the West falls into the pattern described by anthropologist James Clifford when he argues that the modernist moment of engaging the non-West is one of appropriating non-Western difference. The other in this schema is a necessary term to revivify Western aesthetics and humanism and enrich as Eliade emphasizes, the "Western creative genius." In Eliade's discourse, articulating the non-West so as to incorporate it within a scheme of universal humanism is a prerogative of the West, while the other largely figures as the West's "unconscious" or origin of self. The West's meeting with the other corresponds to how the archaic and the mythic is grafted within the "real" so as to extend its meaning beyond the parameters of empirical or positivist notions. Analogously, the unconscious can be said to be inscribed within the conscious, but requires the conscious in order to be "spoken." [7] Eliade's articulation of new humanism emphasizes an existential interconnectedness between the subject and object of study. This mode of hermeneutical engagement requires concrete experience of the other's life-world. Eliade insists upon authenticity of source material as opposed to "dilettantism," or "improvisation" ("Autobiographical Fragment"). To capture this sense of authenticity, Eliade made use of the genre of autobiographical fiction, featuring actual events and persons. The technique of the "authentic" autobiographical journal novel was to be used by Eliade repeatedly over the thirties (Ricketts, 1:56). Not only does Maitreyi replicate the structure of a journal, but it is in large part a transcription from Eliade's Indian journal. As the theme of Bengal Nights elucidates, "love" or erotics becomes an important component of the encounter with other civilizations (Ricketts, 1: 96-97, 109, 583-85). [8] Eliade saw myth as the imaginative expression of lived authenticity, and asserted the continuing structures of mythology even in modern fiction and life (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 23-38; Ordeal by Labyrinth, 165-66). He critiques the project of "historicism," which privileges empirical historical data, as a system of domination deprived of human impulse (Cosmos and History, 147). In contrast to the irreversible historical time of historicism, mythical time is reversible -- it relives, revivifies through repetition (in illo tempore) the time of the "beginnings" (Cosmos and History, 31). It is the denial of the sacrality of being in modernity that has plunged humanity into fragmentation, into the "terror of history" (Cosmos and History, 141). As opposed to mythic/ archaic man who was directly responsible for his history, modern or historic man is a mere cog in the wheel. Eliade claims that Western European rationalistic historicism and materialism such as introduced by Hegel and Marx have neglected the deep structure of unity of the cosmos by failing to acknowledge the enduring spiritual values in cultures across the world.

Hegel's version of history robs human agency by empowering the "Universal Spirit": he "was obliged to see in every event the will of the Universal Spirit ... which, after all, abolishes what Hegel wanted to save in history -- human freedom" (Cosmos and History, 148-49). If, however, the perception of a "Universal Spirit" behind every significant action robs the human subject of freedom and agency, the same case might be made for a perpetual repetition of other mythic structures and agents which Eliade sees as essential to the thought patterns of archaic man. Marx in Eliade's reading refuses the cyclical pattern of history that myth valorizes, but reconfirms "upon an exclusively human level, the value of the primitive myth of the age of gold, with the difference that he puts the age of gold at the end of history ... here for the militant Marxist, lies the secret of the remedy for the terror of history" (Cosmos and History, 148-49). Such a reading renders Eliade's own position extremely confusing. If Hegel places history under the sign of the Universal Spirit, or the Marxist awaits the age of gold at the end of history, it is unclear how they may be reproached with having destroyed sacrality, order and meaning, a case that Eliade makes otherwise. Eliade's assailing of certain myths of modernity appears arbitrary, as his insistence on mythology and on archaic structures at large does not allow him to elaborate grounds for distinction between different orders of myth. [9] New humanism's effort to project human struggles on a cosmic plane is extremely ambivalent; translated into political terms, it can stand for a conscious class elitism. Eliade, following his Romanian mentor Nae Ionescu's idea that the nation is primarily a cultural and not a political instrument, believed that the first task of the state, again in Nae Ionescu's words -- is to "allow and assist everyman to create" (Ricketts, 2:897). However, the term "everyman" here is but another name for the intellectual elite. He opposed spending on primary education for Romanian peasants, as he believed peasants would then be separated from their traditional culture, leaving them "half-educated." Instead, the state should concentrate its efforts in setting up institutes of culture at the higher level, in particular an institute of Oriental studies (Ricketts, 2:897-901; 1:620-21). The new humanism, therefore, is predicated upon decisive occlusions of the creative agency of the other, which has to conform or play up to a schema defined by an elite that inhabits a discursive and political position of power. If archaic/ folk peoples did indeed speak, their mythic creations would no longer remain as primordial archetypes, and that would go against the very project of Eliade's hermeneutics that seeks to uncover hidden meanings from an undefiled autochthonous base. Inscribing the Female Gothic [10] It is precisely as such an enigma or mythic archetype that Maitreyi appears in Bengal Nights. Her character strikes a European reader of the novel, the French poet Claude Henri Rocquet, as follows: What affects me most vividly in the story is the image, the evocation of the young girl, the very presence of desire. The story is a simple one, but it shines and burns with a beauty that creates

desire, like the cave painting of Ajanta, like the Indian erotic poetry (Ordeal by Labyrinth, 49). To Rocquet Maitreyi is an incandescent presence in the novel, which leads paradoxically to generic comparisons with Indian erotic art and to a blurring of any specific features she might possess. Likewise Alain, the hero and first person narrator of Bengal Nights, reacts strongly but ambivalently on being introduced to Maitreyi: "On catching sight of her, a strange tremor went through me, accompanied by a curious feeling of contempt." Alain is particularly affected by the sight of Maitreyi's "naked arm and the strange quality of that sombre brown, so disturbing and so unfeminine; it was the flesh of a goddess or a painted image rather than of a human." Alain has the "vague feeling that the memory of Maitreyi was already connected in some ways to [his] most fugitive thoughts and desires" (Bengal Nights, 1-2). The very opening lines of Bengal Nights thus suggest that its heroine Maitreyi comes already framed through archetypes, and attribute to her an uncanniness and radical undecidability that will haunt the text, into which may be read the tension between a "historical" and "mythic" Maitreyi. Maitreyi glides unpredictably between a real that is physical to the extent of being bestial and evokes "contempt," and a transcendent being best likened to a "goddess" or a "painted image." The description enacts an oscillation between mythic fantasy or imagination on the one hand, and ethnographic observation on the other, where Maitreyi functions as an empirical real and is presented in terms of a fetishization of concrete particulars such as a "naked arm." [11] Ethnographic observation is the keynote when Alain accompanies Lucien Metz, an arrogant Parisian journalist, to Maitreyi's household, on the invitation of her father, named in the novel "Narendra Sen." At Sen's house, the following ethnographic scene ensues: Lucien asked permission to examine Maitreyi's costume, her jewels and ornaments, more closely and Narendra Sen accepted with good grace, leading his daughter over by the hand: frightened, she had drawn back near the window, her lips quivering, her shawl pulled over her head. It was a strange examination. Lucien weighed up the jewels in his hand, giving exclamations of wonder, asked questions and took down the answers in shorthand. During all this, Maitreyi stood, her face ashen, trembling from head to foot as though stricken with pure terror ... then her eyes met mine. I smiled at her. She seemed to have found a haven; fixing her gaze on mine, she gradually became calmer, her spasms ceased and she began to recover her normal state (Bengal Nights, 7).

Several things are noteworthy about the way this scene is organized. Metz's gaze is that of the objectifying, positivist Orientalist, gathering and classifying data on objects of his interest, subjecting them to minute inspection. Maitreyi, the object of his inspection, shrinks before this gaze. Alain, by contrast, wins her sympathy by directing towards her an empathetic gaze. The exchange of glances with Maitreyi was for Alain a "warm and clandestine moment of communion" (Bengal Nights, 8). The difference between Metz's and Alain's approach to Maitreyi mirrors the difference between the empiricist, data-bound methodology in anthropology which calls for observation, inductive reasoning and verification, and Eliade's own hermeneutic/ phenomenological approach which calls for intuitive insight into and identification with the existential conditions of the other (Ordeal by Labyrinth, 128-135). [12] Alain's quasi-anthropological search for authentic experience of an "other" culture seems to meet with success when, on Sen's invitation, Alain moves into his household, and gains access to the inner workings of an Indian family. Like the historical Eliade, Alain quickly takes to his Bengali household, adopting Indian manners and costumes (Bengal Nights, 54; Autobiography, 179-85). Alain decides to convert to Hinduism, in the expectation that this will enable him to marry Maitreyi. But Alain is expelled from Sen's household when his affair with Maitreyi is discovered. [13] Apparently, Sen's despotic treatment of Alain and Maitreyi when he comes to know of their relationship brings the love affair to its tragic end. Sen is depicted as sadistically beating Maitreyi and frustrating all of Alain's efforts to get in touch with her (Bengal Nights, 143). In order to spare her further punishment, Alain leaves Calcutta for the Himalayas (Bengal Nights, 149). Alain's hermeneutic encounter with India, figured in his relationship with Maitreyi, thus fails to come to fruition. On a superficial reading of Eliade's novel, the reason for that failure would appear obvious. In spite of Alain's attempts at sympathetic identification with Bengali culture, he cannot be allowed to marry Maitreyi due to racial difference. Oriental despotism, in the figure of Maitreyi's parents portrayed as vengeful and vindictive, comes in the way and frustrates young love. Such a reading of Bengal Nights ignores, however, a host of discrepant elements in the novel. An alternate reading, which takes these elements into account, would have to deal with the problems posed by the romantic Orientalist model involved in Eliade's discourse itself. [14] Clues for an alternate reading can be had from the dedication Eliade provides to his dissertation on Yoga, published around the same time as he wrote Maitreyi. The dedication runs as follows: "To the memory of my illustrious and venerable patron Maharaja Sir Manindra Chandra Nandi ... my guru Professor Surendranath Dasgupta ... and my teacher Nae Ionescu" (Yoga; author's italics). He also states in his autobiography -- "I dedicated Yoga to the memory of the Maharaja Mahindra Chandra Nandy (sic), Professor Nae Ionescu, and Surendranath Dasgupta, the only persons I considered my 'masters'" (Autobiography, 308). Eliade's autobiography, Ordeal by Labyrinth and even Bengal Nights provide corroborating evidence to show that both Alain and Eliade invest more in their relationship with Maitreyi's father as mentor and benefactor than in their romantic relationships with Maitreyi. In his autobiography, he describes his thoughts while staying in a hermitage in the Himalayas:

I was beginning to understand the reason for the events that had provoked my breakup with Dasgupta ... I had to know passion, drama, and suffering before renouncing the "historical" dimension of my existence and making my way toward a trans-historical, atemporal, paradigmatic dimension ... it was necessary that my relations with Dasgupta pass beyond the phase of candor and superficiality and know the tensions and conflicts that characterize the beginning of true rapport between guru and disciple (Autobiography, 189). [15] Although Bengal Nights claims to inscribe an "authenticity" of experience, and is in that sense closer to a "confession" rather than a novel, the above passage indicates an area of significant divergence between fiction and autobiographical representation. While Bengal Nights stresses Alain's heterosexual romance with Maitreyi and his extreme suffering upon losing her, with Narendra Sen as the culprit, Eliade in his autobiography foregrounds his bond with his dissertation adviser and scholarly guru at the expense of Maitreyi. His relationship with Maitreyi is seen as an aspect of the less important "historical" dimension of his existence, while his relations with Dasgupta lay on a "transhistorical" or mythic plane, to arrive at which historicity needed to be renounced and transcended. When Eliade discussed events in Calcutta during his 1977 conversations with Rocquet, he once again expressed regret for his separation from Dasgupta, not Maitreyi: Rocquet: In September 1930 you left Calcutta for the Himalayas. You left Dasgupta ... Eliade: Yes, after a quarrel, which I regret a great deal. He regretted it too. But at the time I felt there was nothing to keep me in a place where, without Dasgupta, I had no reason for being (Ordeal by Labyrinth, 40). Thus, both Rocquet and Eliade are in agreement that Eliade's chief interest lay in his relationship with Dasgupta. Eliade presents the sequence of events as the result of a quarrel between him and Dasgupta, with Maitreyi effaced from the discussion. Surprisingly, even in Bengal Nights Alain restructures his earlier sentiment of outrage to proclaim at one point that he has wronged Maitreyi's father: "I suffered not simply because I had lost Maitreyi but because I had wronged my benefactor" (Bengal Nights, 158). [16] Seen in this light, it is not Maitreyi's father who disrupts the relationship between Maitreyi and Alain/ Eliade, but rather Maitreyi who disrupts the relationship between the two men. Even

though in terms of historical event Dasgupta expelled Eliade from the household and ended his affiliation with the University of Calcutta following the discovery of his affair with Maitreyi, Eliade holds Maitreyi rather than Dasgupta responsible for his departure from India: "Because of M. I lost the right to become an integral part of 'historical' India" (No Souvenirs, 189). [17] According to Luce Irigaray, exchanges of women between men manifest a structure of homosociality, which underpins a sense of patriarchal social order. In such an exchange "woman's body must be treated as an abstraction" (Irigaray, 175). Eliade's Bengal Nights subjects Maitreyi's body to exactly such a force of dislocation and decentering, whereby Maitreyi's presence either effects a narrative blur or can only be captured in terms of dispersed particulars. As Irigaray suggests, this decentering of Maitreyi is in the service of a pattern of homosocial relationship and exchange, entered into between Maitreyi's father and lover. The woman serves as a vehicle for a more primary relationship with a male mentor, although this relationship is disguised in the case of the fictional Bengal Nights in order to privilege a narrative economy of heterosexual romance and Oriental difference. [18] The pattern of relationship between Alain/ Eliade and Maitreyi, far from being a unique one, is replicated when both the autobiographical Eliade and his fictional counterpart develop a relationship with a European woman named Jenny, who had taken up residence in the Himalayas. The extremes of frenzy and disgust that Alain experiences during their physical intimacy is not unlike what he felt with Maitreyi (Bengal Nights, 171). According to Eliade, the relationship between him and Jenny foundered because his yogic guru, Swami Shivananda, was away and they conducted their erotic experiments without his assent: "Actually, I was not in love with Jenny ... And yet I had consented to know her body in a 'magical' manner, that is in a lucid and detached way, as only an initiate is allowed to do -- and I knew full well that initiation does not exist without a guru" (Autobiography, 199). The structural parallels between Eliade's affairs with Maitreyi and Jenny are obvious. He approaches both affairs as a series of tests or initiatory ordeals for himself, to ascertain whether he can retain lucidity and detachment; the final arbiter remains his guru or mentor. [19] Like Alain's desire for Maitreyi, his attempts at hermeneutic engagement and "intuitive" empathy with the East also extends to siding with Indians in their political struggle against the British. Once again, however, such a relationship is marked by ambivalence: Civil war was threatening to break out again, fuelled by the imprisonment of over fifty-thousand nationalists. I had to witness scenes of violence, charges by mounted police, the sacking and pillaging of the Sikh district in Bhowanipore, I had to see children beaten and women hurt before I, too, became caught up in the revolution. In doing so, I lost my clarity of judgement. I condemned the British out of hand and every new brutality

reported by the newspapers sent me into a rage; whenever I passed Europeans in the street, I looked at them with disgust (Bengal Nights, 1012). Here Alain reports being "caught up in the revolution," recalling Eliade's desire "to become an integral part of 'historical' India." In an analogous fashion, Eliade in his autobiography reports going out on the streets of Calcutta in search of political demonstrations: "I was excited by the civil revolution unleashed by Mahatma Gandhi" (Autobiography, 179-80). Alain/ Eliade's becoming caught up in historical experience suggests Eliade's category of lived experience, which plays a fundamental role in "new humanist" hermeneutics. Rather than being an instrument of cognition, however, lived experience in this instance causes Alain to lose his "clarity of judgement." This is echoed by a loss of vision and memory undergone by him at the moment when he and Maitreyi consummate their relationship: "I remember nothing more, afterwards. I took her, blindly, and no trace of the memory has remained" (Bengal Nights, 112). Crucial moments of lived experience in the text lead to a loss of judgment and a blinding of narrative, moments where hermeneutic connection fails. [20] Alain desires Maitreyi to the fullest, without the accompaniment of doubt or disgust, only insofar as she is physically absent or separated from him. Maitreyi can only be present as an absence; her bodily presence cannot be reconciled with her absorption as an idea. Thus Alain desires Maitreyi as an innocent "virgin," but when she becomes available to him, he suspects her of having erotic relationships with virtually all the men in Sen's large household, including the chauffeur (Bengal Nights, 70-71, 95). He accuses her of seducing all the poets and intellectuals she mentions, including the seventy year old Rabindranath Tagore, who was her mentor (Bengal Nights, 71). The implicit sadomasochistic pattern here surfaces in a narrative will to brutalize Maitreyi, a radical negation of empathy. Towards the end of Bengal Nights, Sen is shown to beat Maitreyi bloody, and thereafter Mrs. Sen -- hitherto depicted as a gentle, affectionate and retiring person as is her prototype in Eliade's autobiography -- orders the chauffeur to beat Maitreyi with a birch rod till she loses consciousness. At the end of Bengal Nights, Maitreyi has "given herself to a fruit seller," is pregnant and on the verge of insanity, to which Alain adds "I sense she committed that act of madness for me" (Bengal Nights, 176). [21] Alain's political identification with Indians and outrage at British atrocities in India is reflected in a sense of disgust at all Europeans, a category that included himself. In a reversal of this move, designed to free himself from the influence of Maitreyi and of Indian culture and reiterate his "Western" identity, he effects a separation by imagining a scene of violence against Indians by Indians, where Maitreyi is subjected to sadistic brutality by her family. To master the scenes of colonial violence that Alain had been forced to witness, Eliade's text inflicts its own violence from whose scene the Westerner has been effaced. The spectacle of Maitreyi's ravaged body and mind pertains to the Gothic force dominating the text's narrative mode, by reinforcing the sensational value of the other necessary to preserve self-other oppositions. As over the question of educating peasants in Romania, the forging of hermeneutic connections breaks down.

[22] Although Eliade claimed that Bengal Nights was written as a confession and included records of actual events directly transcribed from his journal, he admits as well to dramatic modifications of the story: "I drastically modified the conclusion as if I wished to separate myself definitively from Maitreyi. And of course I bathed that faraway world in a pale golden light, radiated from memories and melancholia" (Autobiography, 240). The admission undermines his claim to authenticity of lived experience, from which the novel has now veered away. It also deconstructs the "new humanist" emphasis on the creative capacity of imagination to breach difference, as imagination is now used to effect rather than breach a separation. What emerges, therefore, is a strategic rather than creative use of imagination, where the other is immured in exoticism. [23] At the end of the novel, Alain undermines his own authority by withdrawing all claims to veracity and knowledge of events: My soul is troubled, very troubled ... And yet I want to write everything, everything. And what if it had all been nothing but some huge farce? A fine trick played on me by my passion? ... What do I know of the truth? I would like to be able to look Maitreyi in the eyes ... (Bengal Nights, 176). During an initial encounter with Maitreyi their eyes had met, suggesting a moment of warm communion. That moment had conveyed the promise of Eliade's alternate anthropological approach, calling for the forging of hermeneutic connections with the other. Despite Alain's desire to "write everything, everything," the text yields at this point to narrative exhaustion. The fragmentation of Maitreyi's body in the narrative, and the blindness that afflicts it at crucial moments, all attest to the partial nature of the text's apprehension of Maitreyi, its inability to break out of a specular and exoticizing discourse of the East by which she is framed. With the blindness of narrative and the failure of Alain's gaze, Eliade's exotic quest comes full circle. The aporias of such a quest are manifest both at the levels of Eliade's theoretical formulations of "new humanism," and the working out of such a vision in closely allied works of fiction and autobiography. The Struggle for Language [24] If Maitreyi is a cipher difficult to visualize in Eliade's exoticizing and Orientalist text, Peter Hulme has pointed at a related difficulty in visualizing Caliban in William Shakespeare's The Tempest: "The difficulty in visualizing Caliban cannot be put down to a failure of clarity in the text. Caliban, as a compromise formation, can exist only within discourse: he is fundamentally and essentially beyond the bounds of representation" (Hulme, 108). An obvious issue that emerges out of a reading of these texts is: what if these figures at the margins found a way of articulating their own discourse? How would they then position themselves as subjects? It is useful to look in

this way at the questions posed by Maitreyi Devi's Na Hanyate, translated into English as It Does Not Die. [25] Maitreyi's battle to repossess language takes place within the representational frames available to her. Addressing the relationship between writing by women and feminist theoretical analysis, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita have argued that women writers are clearly imbricated in the ideologies of their times; patriarchies take shape and are transformed in specific historical circumstances. Not all literature written by women is feminist ... Besides, even when the writing is specifically feminist, oppositions to the dominant ideologies of gender can be discomfitingly class or caste bound and draw on assumptions about race or religious persuasion that reinforce the hold of these ideologies and collaborate in extending their authority (Tharu and Lalita, 2:38). [26] Tharu and Lalita's strictures will serve us as salutary reminders of what is at stake as we consider Maitreyi's text, which struggles to break free from certain representational frames, particularly that of the "new" woman emerging from projections of femininity and the female body in Orientalist as well as nationalist rhetorics about India, even as it remains marked by them. Discussion of the issue of women's status in colonial India was subject to considerable ideological overdetermination and nationalism formulated its own distinctive countermoves to colonial ideology. According to Partha Chatterjee, nationalist ideology proposed a series of dichotomies which may briefly be expressed as follows: West = material = outer = world = masculine East spiritual inner home feminine In terms of the nationalist agenda, "what was necessary was to cultivate the material techniques of modern Western civilization while retaining and strengthening the distinctive spiritual essence of the national culture ... The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world -- and woman is its representation" (Chatterjee, 238-39). The new model of Indian femininity "contrasted not only with that of modern Western society; it was explicitly distinguished from the patriarchy of indigenous tradition. Sure enough, nationalism adopted several elements from 'tradition' as marks of its native cultural identity, but this was a deliberately classicized tradition -- reformed, reconstructed" (Chatterjee, 244-45). Thus we have the emergence of a powerful feminine archetype of the "educated" woman as the upholder of moral and aesthetic order, signifying a domain of sublimated cultural identity.

[27] Paradoxically, while nationalism was essentially reinventing Indian womanhood in the image of the "proper lady" of mid-19th century Victorian England, it desired also to align women with classical Sanskrit texts, which are steeped in bodily and erotic descriptions of women. Extending Chatterjee, therefore, it is possible to detect a certain schizophrenia latent in the nationalist subject position. If nationalism privileges the East over the West, this also amounts to a privileging of femininity over masculinity. The nationalist agenda may also be seen as desiring to remake the nation as home, the public in the image of the private. The inner domain of femininity then had to be rearticulated for the public domain. The apparently extra-political and moral domain of femininity thus became an appropriate space for politics, albeit one seen as more legitimate than politics as colonialist (masculinist) power play. In response to a pervasive colonial ethos where race is effectively gendered, nationalism thus speaks in a voice that is at least partially feminine, and opens up an undecidable space in which masculine and feminine writing play together. [28] For Eliade, the name Maitreyi marks "the very presence of desire." Within a nationalist frame, however, "Maitreyi" carries a reverse signification: it evokes the name of a legendary woman philosopher during the Vedic era, the imputed golden age of Hindu womanhood. Maitreyi is mentioned in the Rig-Veda as having merited the knowledge of the divine from the great sage Yajnavalkya, and consequently became a favorite among nationalist writers who argued that she proved the case for the high status of women in ancient India (Chakravarty, 33, 43). Whereas to Eliade and his interlocutors Maitreyi might signify the primitive, the physical and the elemental, within nationalism Maitreyi could stand for the sublimated cultural authority of the educated woman. Maitreyi's own upbringing reflected this "classical" heritage: from very early on, Maitreyi was encouraged by her father to be a poet and a philosopher. In Eliade's version, his protagonist Alain is lucid, chaste, withholding from sexual excess; in Maitreyi's reorganization of the encounter, her heroine is the pursuer of chastity and truth. Amrita, the Maitreyi like protagonist of Na Hanyate, claims that she has derived her moral force from Gandhi, while "Mircea Euclid" (Mircea Eliade renamed) stands in for the promiscuous West. [29] The pursuit of chastity and truth aligns Maitreyi's novel with the Gandhian program of satyagraha or non-violent non co-operation, literally the "desire for truth." Gandhian techniques of satyagraha required people to curb their passions, to restrain themselves when provoked -analogous to prescribed "feminine" codes of conduct. As Spivak astutely remarks, the root of the words sati ("good wife") and the first half of satyagraha (satya or truth) are the same. The satyagrahi or passive resister partook to some extent of the aura of the sati or self-sacrificing wife. According to Ashis Nandy, Gandhi "implicitly defined his goal as the liberation of the British from the history and psychology of British colonialism. The moral and cultural superiority of the oppressed was not an empty slogan to him" (Nandy, 48-49). In this reversal of the civilizing mission, Gandhi thus operates another reversal of the signs of Orientalist discourse. If Bengal Nights can be read as a political allegory of the East-West encounter, in many respects Na Hanyate operates a reversal of it; the final episode of the latter novel, in which Amrita travels to Chicago in order to confront Euclid/ Eliade with the "false writing" of Bengal Nights and bring him

into the light of truth, reiterates a Gandhian pattern of satyagraha as a reverse discourse of civilization. Na Hanyate: Interrogating Orientalism [30] Na Hanyate, like Bengal Nights, is a thinly fictionalized account of autobiographical events. Bengal Nights had changed a few names but significantly preserved Maitreyi's; mirroring this move Maitreyi changes her own name to "Amrita," but modifies only very slightly Eliade's name to "Mircea Euclid." The name "Euclid" is consistent with the novel's portrayal of Eliade as a scholarly/ anthropological eye seeking to integrate his Indian observations and experiences within a rationalistic, quasi-mathematical frame. [31] Unlike the opening of Bengal Nights, where Eliade's hero Alain claims a loss of memory while attempting to narrate his encounter with Maitreyi, Na Hanyate insists on historical verisimilitude by providing specific dates of the events that it narrates, thus countering Eliade's projection of her as an ahistorical being. Maitreyi's narrative records that on September 1st, 1972, a Romanian student of Euclid named Sergei Sebastian visited Amrita in Calcutta, desiring to know more about her relationship with Euclid. Amrita solicits details of Euclid's book from Sergei, and is angered to learn that she is supposed to have been sexually intimate with Euclid, and that her father is reported to have destroyed her life by intervening to stop their affair. Many of the episodes recounted in Bengal Nights return differently inflected in Na Hanyate, providing a better sense not only of Maitreyi's perspective on them, but also of how Eliade's interpretation of events is shaped by a quasi-anthropological perspective. Euclid in the novel is shown as always searching for "a deeper meaning behind everything" (Na Hanyate, 8). On hearing a poem that Amrita has written to a tree standing in front of their house Mircea ... was amazed, exclaiming "pantheism." I did not know then what pantheism was. The line "A tale of love between a girl and a tree" had him bemused ... He could not see that this was no "ism," just a poetic fancy (Na Hanyate, 34-5). Thus Amrita is aware of and resists being apprehended in terms of the reified categories of religious anthropology. She registers a keen sense of disappointment when Euclid compares her to idols on the walls of temples (Na Hanyate, 91). She also notices how the erotics of the guru disciple relationship can overdetermine Euclid's romantic relationship with her. In a conversation which took place in 1953 with Mrs. Stanescu, the wife of an migr Romanian scholar in Paris, Mrs. Stanescu handed her Euclid's book on Yoga which grew out of his dissertation with Amrita's father: I leaf through the book in my hands -- I am stunned as I turn the page. The book is dedicated to my father. It is written there -- "To ... my revered

guru." Well then? Even after what happened, did he retain contact with my father. ... After so many days I see why he did not write to me, he needed more to write his book, and be a specialist on India. ... A curse on such scholasticism, such lust for fame and glory (Na Hanyate, 188). Amrita suspects that Euclid invests more in his scholarly relationship with her father; and that although Euclid never replied to any of her letters, Euclid and her father had kept in touch. She also draws an unfavorable parallel between Euclid's silence to her and novelistic productivity around her: "though he does not have the courage to reply to my letters, he has been making money by selling my flesh for the last forty years! This is the West!" (Na Hanyate, 206). In a nationalist articulation of signs which resists colonial typologies, she identifies the West with materiality, profanity, lack of trust and sexual excess, the obverse of the East's spirituality. [32] As Partha Chatterjee indicates, however, nationalism itself operates certain archetypes of the female subject, and the narrative of Na Hanyate shows how Amrita was socialized into these archetypes during early adolescence, chiefly through the agency of her father. Early in the novel, Sen takes the fourteen year old Amrita along with him to visit Rabindranath Tagore. Upon her father's instructions Amrita began reciting poetry, her own as well as Tagore's. On being asked whether she understood his poems, Amrita repeated what she had heard of Tagore's philosophy from her father: With great self-confidence I ... spouted off the inner meaning of "The Golden Boat" and the philosophy of the jivan-devata, as I had heard my father explicate them. But [Tagore] stopped me midway. I know now how comical such high philosophy sounded coming from a wisp of a girl of fourteen. He said, "Enough ... read for your own enjoyment, others' explanations cannot be of help to you" (Na Hanyate, 17). Evident in the above exchange is Amrita's father's desire to make her conform to a particular script of female subjectivity. The poetic/ philosophical persona that Amrita is sought to be molded into by her father corresponds to the rhetoric of the educated and expressive female self, upheld by nationalism as an icon of cultural identity. The passage quoted above also brings across, however, the narrator's troubled apprehension of her own construction as a subject, which is a recurring feature of the text. [33] The ambiguities of the feminine subject are compellingly underscored when, as a means of improving both Euclid's and Amrita's Sanskrit, Sen decides to administer jointly to both of them lessons in the erotically charged Sanskrit play Shakuntala. The play evokes, on the one hand, a

classical Sanskrit heritage, and is therefore a desirable adjunct to Amrita's education from Sen's point of view. On the other hand, it is suggestive of erotic meanings, and is taken as such by other members of and visitors to the household. While the classical education imparted to the "new woman" is a sign of her advanced spirituality and iconic value for nationalism, the context within which it is imparted creates a highly erotic setting from which Bengali men are excluded, but Euclid allowed in, suggestive of the sublimated erotics of the scene of East-West encounter. [34] Although Sen encourages association between Euclid and Amrita, he expels Euclid from the household when he discovers their romance. Negative stereotypes of the "exotic" foreigner come to the fore, as in the following conversation between Amrita and her mother: "Your father said we know nothing about them -- who knows what his lineage is, what his father and grandfather are like? He could have some foul disease." I'm amazed, this is a strange thing to say -"Mother, he's been here for almost a year now, and never fell ill even for a day. Why should he have a disease?" "Not that kind of illness, you're better off not knowing about it. You've no idea how bad these French can be, entirely uncivilized." "But he's not French -- " "They're all the same -- their civilization is French. ... There is no loyalty among husbands and wives -- they're perpetually deceiving one another -- marrying someone and going away with someone else, you'll not be able to survive in such an obnoxious society" (Na Hanyate, 111-2). [35] While Sen had perceived Euclid as a civilizing figure in his household, the polarities of the civilizing mission now stand inverted. Where Euclid had previously been seen as philosopher, scholar and guardian of "high" knowledges, he now becomes a figure of promiscuity and degenerate excess, perhaps harboring unnamed sexual diseases. This dramatically foregrounds the aporia present in nationalism's construction of the educated woman: while a sublimated erotics on a plane of "culture" and ideas is permissible between East and West, romance is tantamount to a desublimation that radically destabilizes identities. The Rhetoric of Blindness and Sight [36] In response to her father's or Euclid's duplicities, Amrita emphasizes a politics of "truthtelling," which is contingent upon a feminization of the political. She specifically cites the Gandhian text of satyagraha as the force behind her epic journey to meet Euclid. The aspect of

Amrita's quest as satyagraha is dramatically staged in the climactic encounter of the novel, in which she travels to the country where Euclid lives, and breaks in upon him unannounced: [Amrita]: "is it easy coming to see you after forty two years!" [Euclid]: "certainly not. I could not have done it myself. How many times have I had the opportunity to visit India, the land of my dreams, but I did not go -- how could I?" [Amrita]: "Why? Is it because of me?" He nodded: "that is so ..." "And I came precisely because you are here. Where do you think I received my courage from? ... From Gandhi. I thought if he could do it, why couldn't I? ..." (Na Hanyate, 244). In clearly linking her personal predicament with Gandhi's political struggle conceived as a quest for "truth," Amrita reconceives political relations between India and the West in personal terms. Her journey West to establish the truth of her personal relations with Euclid, allegorizes the triumph of Gandhi's reverse discourse of civilization over Western values. In her playing out of the Gandhian paradigm of moral certitude, Amrita seeks to bring Euclid into the light of truth which he has lost sight of owing to his investment in pedantry and scholasticism removed from human feelings. From the moment Amrita enters Euclid's office, he refuses to look her in the eye. When he finally does so in response to her urgings she sees her worst fears have come true: the light has left his eyes, and he is blind. [37] The novel sustains a register of historical verisimilitude almost till its end. But from the point of Amrita's discovery of Euclid's blindness, there is a leap into allegorical fantasy. As Euclid's voice floats up from behind, Amrita finds herself swept up by a phoenix. The novel concludes with the phoenix's speech to Amrita: "Never fear Amrita, you will restore the light in his eyes ... the day you meet in the Milky Way, not very far off now ..." (Na Hanyate, 247). Although during their final encounter Amrita tells Euclid that she is not to be apprehended as myth or symbol, this alters at the end of the narration when she aspires to a kind of disembodied, mythic immortality. This aspiration is present in the title of the novel itself; the phrase Na Hanyate is taken from the Bhagavad Gita, and figures as well in the epigraph of the novel: ayo nitya sasvato 'yam purano na hanyate hanyamane sarire ... nainam chindanti sasatrani nainam dahati pavakah [Unborn, eternal, everlasting, primeval, it does not die when the

body dies ... whom weapon cannot pierce, fire cannot burn]. The phrase na hanyate [it does not die] suggests aspiration to a quality of existence beyond the earthly and material, which undercuts Amrita's insistence to Euclid that the worldly aspects of her existence should not be overlooked. She cites this verse from the Gita to Euclid during their final encounter, telling him "I have come to see that you which weapon cannot pierce, fire cannot burn" (Na Hanyate, 246). At this point she invites Euclid to cancel time and history and enter a mythic mode of being; there is a move to attain immortality through the spiritualization of erotic love. The name "Amrita" signifies "immortal" and is related to amrit or the elixir of life, a drink of the gods which confers immortality. The scene of final encounter between Amrita and Euclid reveals a mode of articulation that is radically split and ambivalent. On the one hand, there is a critique of Euclid's scholarly and bookish mode of existence, on the ground that it aspires to a kind of ethereal abstraction cut off from historical existence. But on the other hand, Amrita herself aspires to a dissolution of the barriers of space and time, a kind of classical immortality and spirituality that is equally textually mediated. [38] Both Eliade's and Maitreyi's writings mark out a problematic of truth. In Eliade's case he found it necessary to graft the "authentic" in his writing, which was the ground for his inclusion of Maitreyi's name and other "true" particulars. Yet his narrative suffers from indirection and is afflicted by a certain blindness, till in the end his hero Alain withdraws all claims to truth. Likewise, the professed intent of Maitreyi's text is to give body to a reserve of "truth," to embody the essence of Indian femininity, as opposed to the promiscuous scattering (of seed, meaning) that takes place in Euclid's writing. Yet her text is afflicted by a similar force of dislocation: the "spiritual" aspects of Indian femininity get rewritten as something else, as articulating instead the truth of a desire which destabilizes identities. Satya-[a]graha: Desire for Truth and the Truth of Desire [39] In Na Hanyate, even the most virulent denunciations of Euclid's actions by Amrita are almost always followed by a confession of desire: Mircea why did you write lies? ... Such lies were composed to rack up sales in the bazaar ... I am an Indian woman, honor is dearer than life to me ... you have disrobed me in front of many -- is this love? ... [the artist] Nandalal has a painting, the shadowy figure of a captive Sita is gripping a windowbar at the dead of night ... I am in a similar situation -- take away these bars -- let me cross the ocean of time, leaving behind my household of forty years, leaving behind my name, fame, duties ... Mircea I want to see you once more (Na

Hanyate, 32-3). Amrita starts out in this passage by aligning herself with a cultural nationalist position and affirming the spiritual identity of the Indian woman. Within moments however, the narrative issues a disclaimer rendering meaningless the calls of reputation and duty. Interestingly, Amrita's disclaimer is mediated by the figure of Sita, Rama's chaste wife in the Ramayana. Amrita's citing of the Sita legend has the force of a catachresis, wrenching it free of its usual contexts and signification. In the Ramayana, Sita is abducted by the demon Ravana and pines to return to Rama and her household. But in Amrita's case it is her very household that has become a prison, and she seeks an exile from her professed identity and selfhood. Citing Sita, she achieves a precise inversion of the Sita myth. Sita constitutes, therefore, an ideal bridge figure, which condenses both the senses of pining for a lost beloved and lost time, as well as of being a sati (good wife), therefore etymologically linked to the satya (truth) that Amrita, following Gandhi, seeks. While nationalism, particularly in its Gandhian version, valorized Sita and sought to make her a cultural role model for Indian women (Jayawardena, 86-96), Amrita's use of the Sita figure articulates simultaneously a cultural nationalist identity and its discontents. [40] As the alienation of the narrating persona deepens Amrita also alienates herself from her educators. There emerges in her text an "other," manic voice which angrily disrupts and disfigures all the authorities to which she owes her subject construction. Reflecting on the mediations of Tagorean literary and aesthetic discourse, she asks: Who fashioned our minds in this way? Who is responsible for this division of jati [race/ caste/ group]? Who else but Rabindranath Tagore? For those of us who have seen the world through his songs, there is no doubt that our universe differ from those who don't ... I lack connection with the greater world ... alone, so completely alone ..." (Na Hanyate, 165). The manic voice reaches a crescendo in the following passage, where writing turns parricidal and displaces all her former authorities: I returned home to find mother waiting for me at the door. Anger surged in me at the sight of her, this woman is the cause of all our troubles. She destroyed my life, because "he" [Amrita's father] might be hurt! ... Other people's joys and sorrows don't matter ... despite knowing everything, this woman married me to a man without speech, fourteen years my senior ... She even says, "My son-in-law is a great yogi" ... he may well be a

saint ... but I did not want a follower of the Gita, I wanted a human being of flesh and blood, a human being (Na Hanyate, 194). Amrita's voice dispenses here with the niceties of feminine performance. The very sight of her mother causing her to flare up suggests, however, a moment of recognition where she perceives in her mother her own mirror as self-sacrificing womanhood; her anger therefore is also a displacement of the Gandhian figuration of Indian woman as nurturing mother and as self-effacing and martyred womanhood, which inscribes a blueprint for national identity. Apart from her parents Amrita also lashes out against her husband, whom she sees as embodying the ideal of disinterestedness in the Bhagavad Gita, due to his calm demeanor and detachment from passion. We have noted the derivation of the title and epigraph of the novel from the Gita, suggesting that the Gita plays a prominent role in the novel's conceptualization. At this point, however, Amrita's displacement of the Gita reinforces the split evident in Na Hanyate's narration. By criticizing the Gita she also displaces Gandhi, whose notion of spirituality and its application to politics was founded on the ideal of disinterested duty he read into the Gita (Sharpe). [41] Through a displacement of the patriarchal authorities which constitute her self and define the discourses and idioms in which she speaks, Amrita's text seeks to articulate a sense of women's agency, albeit complex, problematic and shot through with contradictions. If we are to regard Na Hanyate as analogous to Caliban's text, it is clear then no uniform subjectivities or teleologies of resistance may be read into it. As it stands, Caliban's entry into language cannot promise us a complete transparency of communication nor a complete displacement of available ideologies that have made Caliban's enunciation possible. What emerges, instead, is a multiplicity of voices, not necessarily consistent with each other, but effecting an estrangement of the signs of dominant discourse. Amrita's rewriting of the dominant tropes of "truth" and "fidelity" suggest it is possible to reinflect and appropriate the signs of dominant discourses to assert a complex sense of agency and empowerment. Very importantly, Caliban is available here as a witness to her construction, and shows up the contingency of signs through which it is effected. WORKS CITED Chakravarty, Uma. "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?: Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past." Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989. pp. 27-87. Chatterjee, Partha. "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question." Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Eds. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989. pp. 233-53. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: 20th Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1988.

Devi, Maitreyi. Na Hanyate (Bengali). Calcutta: Prima Publications, 1974. It Does Not Die (English). 1974. Reprint. University of Chicago, 1994. The English text is a very free rendition of the Bengali, hence all citations have been translated again by me, although I have referred to the author's original translations. Dudley III, Guilford. Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics. Philadelphia: Temple University, 1977. Eliade, Mircea. "Autobiographical Fragment." Girardot and Ricketts, cited below, pp. 113-27. -----. Autobiography: Journey East, Journey West, Volume I: 1907-1937. Trans. M.L. Ricketts. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981. -----. Bengal Nights. Trans. C. Spencer. University of Chicago, 1993. -----. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. -----. "History of Religions and a New Humanism." History of Religions 1 (1961), pp. 1-8. -----. Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Harvill Press, 1960. -----. No Souvenirs: Journal, 1957-1969. Trans. Fred H. Johnson, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. -----. Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude Henri Rocquet. Trans. Derek Coltman. University of Chicago, 1982. -----. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. University of Chicago Press, 1969. -----. Yoga: Essay on the Origins of Indian Mysticism. Paris, 1936. Dedication reproduced in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Girardot, N.J. and M.L. Ricketts, eds. Imagination and Meaning: the Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade. New York: Seabury Press, 1982. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797. London: Methuen, 1986. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. C. Porter with C. Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1985. Jayawardena, Kumari. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1986.

Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983. Ricketts, Mac Linscott. Mircea Eliade: the Romanian Roots, 1907-1945. 2 vols. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1988. Sharpe, Eric J. "Gandhi's Gita." The Universal Gita: Western Images of the Bhagavad Gita: a Bicentenary Survey. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985. pp. 103-22. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ''Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. 271-313. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988. pp. 271313. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. University of Chicago, 1992. Tharu, Susie and K. Lalita, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. 2 vols. New York: Feminist Press, 1993. Back to the top

SRIPARNA BASU teaches English at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata, India. She is currently working on a book project on nationalism and citizenship in Indian women's writing in English and Bengali, and completing an anthology of Muslim women's writings in prepartition Bengal, translated into English. Copyright 2001 Ann Kibbey. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Copyright 2001 Ann Kibbey.

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MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS: A PASSION-PLAY OF MARTYRDOM

A Hindu who fights for his country and dies is as much a Hindu martyr in the religious sense as one who fights for his temples?... For the Hindus every inch of their land is divine Every inch of our land is sacred and

so are the rivers and the mountains. ... To fight for the motherland is therefore the same as fighting for the vedas [sacred texts] or for the temples. ... In that way the Hindus can never be really secular in the Western sense. . . . There is no such thing as a secular Hindu . . . that is why Hindus do not differentiate between religious martyrs and secular martyrs.... There can be no Gods without the land, and there can be no land without the Gods Therefore, those who are fighting for a temple at Ayodhya are as much political Hindus as those who are laying down their lives for Kashmir.... To me the struggle for Ayodhya is not a religious struggle. It is as political a struggle as the struggle in Kashmir.1 Our specialness lies in the fact that we have been a nation for eternity, and although enemies have come and gone, they have not been able to touch our culture and nation, we have remained India and Indian . . . Walking on the path of truth is the pride of our country. We cast aside untruth. This is our pride ... It is for the sake of our truth that our heroes have been martyred.2 On 30 October and 2 November 1990, /car sevaks gathered in Ayodhya to celebrate a flag-hoisting ritual that was part of the so-called 'struggle for the liberation of Ram's birthplace' and the conquest of the Babri mosque. They had also come to protest against L K Advani's arrest in Bihar on 23 October while conducting his Ram Rath Yatra through the Hindi belt. The Indian government, with support of the state governments of Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring Bihar, had placed a ban on the assembly, stationed 18,000 troops in Ayodhya and arrested thousands of supporters before they could even reach the town.3 Both arrest and ban had resulted from Advani's announcement

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that, in Jaffrelot's words, 'the BJP would withdraw its support from V P Singh's government if the latter placed a prohibition on the building of the temple, and . . . that early elections be held'.4 Despite the ban and arrests, more than 40,000 kar sevaks entered the city5 and assembled for the flag hoisting, chanting and shouting victorious slogans. The situation became out of control when some of the kar sevaks started to climb over the fence separating them from the mosque. Police and paramilitary security forces first started firing tear-gas but then switched to using guns.6 Violent clashes between the government forces and kar sevaks led to the killings of civilians. The number of dead is still debated and ranges from a few hundred (according to Sangh Parivar sources) to less than a dozen (government sources).7 The killings, referred to by Hindutva spokespeople as a 'massacre' and part of an ongoing 'genocide' against Hindus, brought the Ayodhya controversy new popularity among supporters. Furthermore, it provided potential for new recruits to join Sangh Parivar's 'battle' against the alleged pseudo-secular forces of the Indian government. I shall discuss the figure of the martyr as an important element within

Hindutva representations, and as another 'wish-image' that combines diverse concepts of social agency for the purpose of mobilization. Crucial to the argument developed in this chapter is that the exploitation of the idea of heroic martyrdom mirrors Hindutva ideologues' attempt to claim access to, and amalgamate the national subject's internal being and familial loyalties. Based on the rhetoric of martyrdom as a unifying force between various 'members' of the Hindu family, the figure of the kar sevak could be displayed, and juxtaposed to other models of agency, as an essentially innocent and passive agent. The videos discussed below served the purpose of displaying the martyrdom narrative in public. In them, the kar sevaks were said to have died willingly, to have voluntarily chosen self-sacrifice and martyrdom for the national welfare. However, it is highly questionable that this was the case. Rather, the dead were transformed into martyrs post mortem. Their death was packaged as a pathos-filled rhetoric of the Hindu people's suffering, intended be used as a performative and pedagogical marketing tool that allowed the Sangh Parivar to spread the idea of sacrifice as a national duty; and to create a cult of martyrdom. In this context, Hindutva leaders remained untouched by the obligation to sacrifice themselves, even though references are repeatedly made about their willingness to give their lives. Instead, it was the anonymous masses who were to convert the idea of a dedicated movement into political practice and to 'give (their) life' to the metaphor of martyrdom. Because of this clear hierarchization and instrumentalization, I will refer to them as 'underdog martyrs'. In this context, the relevance of and interests behind the construction of a cult of martyrdom will be discussed as it became translated and presented in a selection of three Jain Studios videos that were produced at various stages in the chronology of the Sangh Parivar's Ayodhya agitation between 1989 and 1992. The first video discussed here is God Manifests Himself (GMH, 1990). It anchors the Ayodhya movement in the mythical lineage of sacred battles and paves the way for a narrative of the stated martyrdom of the Hindu people. In their interpretation as alienated and oppressed people, their fate is indirectly linked to the suffering of Jews in ancient Egypt or the Christians under the Roman Empire. Depicting another battle in the whole chain of conflicts narrated in GMH, the next video, We Can Give Up Our Lives But We Cannot Break Our Vow (Pran jaye par Vachan na jaye, 1990, Hindi; hereafter, We Can Give Up Our Lives...), displays at length the illegitimacy of a tyrannical secular state; the alleged devotional dedication of kar sevaks, their assassination through the guns of paramilitary forces and the subsequent attempt by the Sangh Parivar to establish a cult of martyrdom. Studio owner J K Jain confidently commented on this video that it was: 'a film that moved the people. This was the film which had been most consequential in the Indian history so far'.9 The third video, entitled The Truth Shall Not Be Touched (Saach ko anch na Pyaree, 1992, Hindi) has in the previous chapter been described with regard to the presentation of 'evidence' to support the claim for the

reconstruction of a Ram temple. Here, it will be discussed in its function to project the movement as a court-case, the nation-people as judge and the martyrs as witnesses of injustice. Video visions of mother, sons and holy war10 Why and how has the concept of martyrdom come to play such a central role in Hindutva imagination and politics? Where have the central images and metaphors to martyrdom been adapted from and how were they exploited in the videos? A key force behind the positioning of the idea of martyrdom at such an exposed point in the discourse of Indianness lies in the complexity of the concept itself as it came to be linked to the already established chain of associations surrounding the metaphor of the tortured body of the Hindu nation. The videos discussed here constitute an audiovisual martyrology and historiography of the Indian nation which emphasizes that the notion of Hindutva Indianness was inscribed with the narrative of sacred violence and holy war (dharma yuddha ); of heroic warriors ostensibly dying to protect the honour of and liberate their Motherland. Through this rhetoric, actual violence against alleged threats, in particular from the Muslims, could be legitimized. Let us take a look at the ways in which violence could be transformed into a sacred deed, if not task, to be performed by Hindutvavadis.

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236 EMPOWERING VISIONS The end of tolerance and the sanctity of violence There have been 76 battles to liberate the temple, the birthplace of Sri Ram, in which 375,000 Hindus have become martyrs. And then the trumpet call for the new battle of liberation began ... to protect the dignity of the nation.1 While the key questions of the previous chapters with respect to modes of selfempowerment were 'How can we create reverence for a map?' and 'How can we rewrite history?' the central question of this chapter is 'How can we transform ordinary citizens into martyrs?' In the figure of the martyr-to-be, the metaphors of the world as a temple and battlefield, as well as the 'pseudo-secular' state as a prison, found expression as imaginative tools that could be enacted in order to provoke agitation. This agency was very much linked to reciprocal obligations such as duty and loyalty, to feelings of pride and honour. GMH is, as J K Jain explains in his introductory speech to the video, a homage to Ram, a 'prayer', a manifestation of nationalist fervour. Given the fact that a historiography of battles follows this short introduction, depicting the (unsuccessful) struggle of the Indian people to reassert themselves and unite, this statement was in itself a mantra or a call for battle for the constitution of the imagined Hindu nation. The sacredness of the 76 battles fought, and the death of 375,000 warriors who all became martyrs, became exclusively tied to the site of Ayodhya, the 'symbol of our identity, our country, our national life'.13 Out of this intense sacralization emerged Lord Rama as a figure of beauty and strength, both in physical appearance and conduct. GMH does not refer to Ramlalla alone: there are also references to 'the armed warrior who fought for righteousness'14 and appeals to the viewers to join the battle for

Ram Rajya. This image is related to posters of an adult Ram emerging from a model of the proposed birth temple. He seems to face a storm that approaches him; clouds of thunder and fire surround him while he holds bow and arrow firmly in his hands. Time and again, I was told by informants that this warrior-icon was necessary to communicate the end of both the patience and tolerance of the Hindu people, and thus mark the advent of anger and preparation for a revolutionary battle. The image was interpreted as the visualization of Lord Ram's anger upon the refusal of the God of the sea to grant him a safe transfer to the island of Lanka. There, the demon-god Ravana was said to have hidden Ram's wife Sita.15 Likewise, some informants pointed out that only after Ram threatened to use force was he allowed to cross the sea, supported by general Hanuman's monkey army. Read between the lines in GMH, similar interpretations emerge, linked, however, to an alleged crisis in contemporary national MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 237 politics. Lord Ram's case was now placed in a context where the Sangh Parivar, as his spokespeople, became authorized to challenge the secular state and those Muslims groups unwilling to hand over the Babri mosque. In order to reach the object of desire, be it the reconstruction of Ram's purported birth temple, or the liberation of Bharat Mata, support was required from Ram bhaktas or kar sevaks. GMH carries footage of a speech by the chief of the Ayodhya municipality, a Mahananda Kumar, as he addresses kar sevaks at a meeting on 8 November 1989: Lord Ram, even though he is the master of the universe, took a human form and fought to protect our culture and humanity. All of you must acknowledge this depth and fight for his temple at his birthplace. Even if you have to face lathi-charge and bullets. Proclaim the temple will be made there and there only! This appeal further suggests that the unity and happiness of the Indian nation can only be achieved through a prolongation of the lineage of battles and martyrdom. Such a rhetoric claim affirms Tanika Sarkar's observation as regards the constitution of national communities in India. Discussing Chattopadyay's novel Anandamath of 1882, one of the crucial works that established a frame for nationalist imagination in the late nineeenth century and throughout the twentieth century, Sarkar notes that the only way to imagine the Hindu community as united was through the projection of a community enrolled in a 'spectacle of violence'16 and of an Indian citizenry merged into a homogenous body of devotees as 'soldiers at war'. One crucial scene in the video GMH uses the effect of cartoon drawings. The story of a meeting between various warrior-saints to discuss guerrilla strategies in order to resist the Mughal invaders is depicted. The voice-over commentary introduces them as bearers of national pride and dedication. But this battle too, so the story went, was lost, and soon the drawings lead the invisible eye of the camera onto a battlefield covered in the blood of dying and the bodies of dead soldiers (see Figures 11, 62). The relevance of the scene for this discussion lies in the presentation of an important figure that shaped the notion of martyrdom in Hindu nationalism. It is the warrior-saint, a motif that is intended to confer ideal-typical agency and legitimacy to the video-watching kar sevak. Footage of the same assembly in Ayodhya presents a speech by a Swami Ramanandas Saraswati: 'The first people who offer their lives as sacrifice will be the sadhus, the ordinary people will follow after'. There are indications of a 'hierarchy of martyrdom' in this quote, and we shall return to this when

the 'underdog martyr' is discussed below. It should be mentioned here that pilgrimage sites such as Ayodhya have never been solely sites of peaceful religious assemblies. They often functioned

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238 EMPOWERING VISIONS MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 239 as a place where power politics of army-like monastic orders were staged. As William Pinch convincingly traces, soldier sadhus or sannyasis (renouncers), who were known for their access to popular sentiment: 'have for many centuries played a patriotic role in defending (an idealized) Hindu India from foreign, particularly Muslim, depredation'.18 The activities of the warriors and their 'vision of India . . . combined territorial nationalism and Hindu religious symbolism'.19 Pinch further points out that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the sadhu was perceived as a key figure of Hindu revivalism and patriotism and placed 'at the heart of the Indian body politic'.20 Thus it could not have taken much effort to recruit this figure into concepts of martyrdom. The important role of warrior-saints (paralleled by a number of warrior-kings and queens)21 was picked up and marketed systematically by the VHP Thus, GMH carries footage of countless VHP-saints presented as charismatic leaders and warlords, preaching both peace and violence as they address public meetings during kar seva in Ayodhya. In God Manifests Himself, songs support the notion of self-sacrificing warriors who seem to be assured of Ram's divine blessings: 'Ram is there, this is his birthplace, this is our pledge, we have no fear ... We are taking the boat of the nation across the storm, we do not feel thunder or lightning. We accept the challenge and return it'. Many of the songs are accompanied by shots of holy rivers, temples, Hindutva's saffron flag (bhagadwaj), worshippers and portraits of Ram. Two different categories of violence were called upon within the notion of the selfless kar sevak, thereby distinguishing morally illegitimate and legitimate agents. The first category was allegedly practised by the government and imposed upon the victimized Indian people. The second was allegedly enacted in response to the experience of state oppression. Hindutva rhetoric transferred this uneven relationship between passive victim and revolutionary patriot, fused in one ideal-typical person of the martyr-to-be, to the level of mythic analogy by accompanying him with the stereotyped figure of the 'aggressive Other'. Here, two antagonistic ideasgoonda rajya (unjust/criminal rule) and Ram rajya (Ram's righteous rule)came to add symbolic meaning. While minorities like the Muslims were depicted as representatives of goonda rajya, encouraging terrorism and separatism as well as abusing their constitutional privileges as a religious minority, 'citizens' of Ram rajya could be portrayed as dedicated bearers and courageous protectors of equality, liberty and fraternity. While the first group could be stigmatized as 'terrorists' and 'anti-nationals', the latter became 'freedom fighters' involved in a sacred battle, blessed both by Lord Ram and the peace-loving people. Fighting for the welfare of society thus led to the authorization of holy violence. The notion of holy violence as it is placed on visual and verbal display in all three videos reveals references to the popular epic Mahabharata, in particular the spectacular battle between two enemies, the Pandavas and their cousins, the Kauravas. While the last scene of We Can Give Up Our Lives . . . depicts shots of police attacking kar sevaks, a song invokes the epic, addressing those

kar sevaks who had fought and even died in the police encounter as dedicated soldiers of the Pandavas: 'You were challenging the might of the Kauravas and their armies.. . Victory is yours! ... You crossed all obstacles and made a path with your own blood'. The epic was not only called upon in BJP rhetoric because of its pan-national popularity and its highly emotional and crisisridden potential. The Mahabharata narrates the sanctification and support of a war between two enemies by divine forces. Lord Krishna, like Ram the embodiment (avatar) of the god Vishnu, is said to have descended from the heavens to establish righteous moral and social order (dharma). He did so in a time of emergency, when human beings seemed unable to solve a crisis. GMH carries shots of popular prints displaying Arjun, a noble warrior (Kshatriya), in a chariot (rath). Accompanied by Krishna, he moves towards the battlefield at Kurukshetra (see Figure 47). Krishna's presence at the side of Arjun consecrated the killings and guaranteed victory as everything was supposedly carried out according to dharma.13 Similarly, in a docu-drama scene of the same video, the child Ram appears at a moment when, according to the voice-over commentary, Hindu consciousness was at a stake and required awakening in order to be saved from further societal decline. Such narratives of'divine miracles', of signs emerging on the television screen like hallucinatory visions, were to enhance the oscillation between the domains of politics and imagination. Kar sevaks as militant 'matriots'
24

Motherland, May we sacrifice all for thee. Bharat Mata is there ... The same sort of sentiment is with the cow also. And then, there are Rama, Krishna and the different pilgrimage centres. All these things evoke a nationalist sentiment in the people. The only thing is: they have to be translated into the modern idiom.... All these things are joined together to save your country!... Modern idiom means: the sentiments are there, but you have to arouse them'Look here, the Britishers cut off the hands of Bharat Matahere and therenow they're (Pakistan) trying to cut off Kashmir (he makes a sign of decapitation), so this is Bharat Mata, this is what is happening.' And immediately people will react to that by saying: 'Yes, this is happening!'25 In order to affirm the aforementioned argument that the videos discussed here ought to be understood as a continuation of established martyrologies, and in order to understand martyrdom as a field of discourse, a discussion of

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240 EMPOWERING VISIONS the elaboration of and reference to the depiction of emotional bonds and personal relationships is crucial. Next to Ram, the object of nationalist desire within Hindutva ideology and politics, love of the territory as identity-constituting referent is, as we saw previously, Mother India. The kar sevaks are defined as her devoted sons. Personified this way, nationalist devotion could thus be projected as 'natural' part of familial love. The intrinsic relationship between nurturing mother and sons, narrated almost like a passion play, has come to serve as a major tool of emotive mobilization. The narrative of the holy battle in the Ayodhya videos, particularly in We Can Give Up Our Lives . . ., reflects the gendered predicament of nationalist

agency. Footage and voice-over commentary displays young men, carrying flags or even sticks as they dance or march on the streets while cheerfully chanting slogans. The stage on which the narrative of the battle for Hindu self-empowerment is set is the actual event centred round the flag-hoisting ceremony in autumn 1990 in Ayodhya. Particularly in We Can Give Up Our Lives . . ., the kar sevaks come to be defined as key protectors of national pride. They can be understood as 'militant matriots', a term coined by Lise McKean while referring to the VHP's elaboration of a rhetoric based on the self-sacrificial and militant code of conduct of Hindutva supporters to guarantee Mother India's well-being. The term proves useful in discussing the depiction of radical deshbhakti in Jain Studios' issue-based videos. The formulation of a crisis that required radical agitation, laid out in the narrative of the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri mosque controversy, is based on the suggestion that both Ram and Mother India had to be liberated from their imprisonment. Their liberation equals the liberation and reassertion of the Hindu people, and the constitution of ideal nationhood and governance (Chapters 2 and 4) Getting ready to fight in a holy battle in this context means that the male agent had to be prepared to defend his mother's, that is, the nation's, honour, to liberate her from the humiliation of purported alien tyranny and threat. The role of the woman is reduced to that of a passive recipient relying on and demanding protection from male agents as well as being ready to give birth to sons as martyrs-to-be. The idealized vision of Mother India as an overarching, uniting and controlling force and as a vessel of male desire, finds reflection in the following statement by Ramnath Ojha, the VHP consultant for GMH: 'So many persons say "We are a son of India!" No son can be a man without a mother ... Bharat Mata is higher than all mothers'.28 Personhood and peoplehood are thus defined through the metaphor of a mother's love for her son. This also suggests that manhood must find affirmation in the unrestricted love of the son for his mother/motherland. The symbolic relationship between the two implies that any weakening or humiliation of MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 241 the mother could instantly affect the status and sentiments of her sons. Thus, in order to keep the reciprocal association in balance, the son has to guard and protect his mother's honour at all times and against all odds. Correspondingly, it is the (male) national citizen who can guarantee the nation's integrity and welfare by the power of his love and loyalty. A specific kind of'matriot' was required for Hindutva's battles. The warriorsaint was not the only ideal-typical model appropriated in this context. He had to be strong enough and willing to make history by dedicating his life for the welfare of (Hindu) society. The following reinterpretation of the vedas, ancient Sanskrit scriptures, from an RSS perspective, reads: 'He who does not possess (the) spirit of patriotism, does not deserve to be called a man'.29

National passion, linked to the central concept of masculinity (purusawa ) and martial spirituality, were identified with physical strength and willpower. Consequently, a man's greatest enemies were said to be physical weakness and lethargy. Reading the same source again it almost sounds like a threatening affirmation of social Darwinism: 'Weakness is the greatest sin and root of all calamities. The weak have no right to live'31. However, the orientalist and colonial stereotype of the effeminate Indian male is also inscribed in this attempt to redefine manhood. Crisisthe source of battle and potential weaknesswas constructed on the basis of what was displayed as threat to this natural devotion, the primordial love of sons. It works in a framework set up to constitute a dramatic script evolving from an object-cause of desire. Standing between a citizenry of sons and the nation-mother, pushing the desired object out of reach, is the source of conflict or crisis: an actual or imagined Other who impacts upon the nation in such a way that it could not become 'real' and enjoyable, but has to remain an even more distant, Utopian fantasy.32 This Other (here, predominantly the Muslim) has to also be personified as male in order to increase the narrative tension and to work within the complicated drama of competition, betrayal and jealousy over the fetishized object of devotion. Anti-national elements, so it is assumed, do not respect Mother India as their mother, thus mistaking her for 'any' woman, ready-made for sexual harassment and humiliation, or do not recognise her beauty and importance for the well-being of the nation. This strategy of using gender for discrimination can be related to what Sarkar calls 'male fantasising that encompasses sexual passion and political violence in a single impulse of pleasure'.33 Only Mother India's sons may touch and control access to their mother. Yet for this exclusive privilege, they must be prepared to die for her, too. 'Tests' of loyalty were established to distinguish between self and other in Hindutva rhetoric. In the case of the Ayodhya controversy, Muslims were asked to prove their love for the nation by handing over the Babri mosque. Such categories of humiliation allegedly

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demanding an instant response are inherent in the following statement by an angry kar sevak on display in some footage of We Can Give Up Our lives... He says: 'This Babar, who died in India! Nevertheless, he wanted to be buried elsewhere, in his own country'. In wanting to be buried 'at home', not in India, Babar became a representative for an essentialized attitude of the so-called 'anti-national' Muslim whose loyalties and bonds, so it has often been stated, were said not to be directed towards the Indian territory but towards 'his'

holy-land (Mecca) and ideal-typical transnational brotherhood {ummah). Mention must be made here of a misinterpretation on the part of those Hindutva ideologues who argue that Muslims per se do not recognize the idea of patriotism and are thus essentially anti-national. In Iran, for example, identical gendered metaphors of motherland/ birthplace (votan), purity of the woman/ nation, the lovers of the nation (vatan'parasti) and the love of the homeland (vatan'dusti) exist.34 Furthermore, the Islamic notion of vatan of around 1900 was based on adaptations of both the European concepts of the modern nationstate (la patrie) and a reinterpretation of Persian-Islamic traditions, especially sufi. Like bhakti devotion, sufi poetry emphasises the unification with the divine and is based on mystical erotic love poetry.35 Finally, vatan came to delineate a bounded territory like Iran as an essential ingredient of the constitution of a brotherhood in order to distinguish one community, in Afsaneh Najmabadi's words, from 'other emerging brotherhoods such as the Arabs, the Ottoman Turks, the Japanese, the Indians, and of course, the nations of Europe'.36 By claiming the power of definition over motherhood and national devotion, Hindutva ideologues denied other members of Indian society the right to particularity and the 'competence' of having any nationalist feelings. Mother and 'matriot'an excursus on iconography and poetry The concept of the martyr, as well as the cult of the mother goddess in India, existed before the introduction of the Western model of the modern nationstate and the elaboration of an infrastructure for visual mass media around 1900. With the rise of nationalism and the spread of the popular media such as chromolithographs, journals and leaflets with anti-colonial slogans and poetry in around 1900 in India, mother goddess and warrior-saint were reinterpreted and married to each other in the dynamic narrative of national sovereignty. Because of this 'career', they would later acquire a new relevance for postcolonial Hindu nationalism. Popular prints have repeatedly displayed the Motherland as a figure in despair, humiliated by invading forces, in need of protection by her male warrior-sons in battle (see Figures 57 and 59), or calling her children to join her in the battle against diverse anti-national threats, for example, Christianity, Islam and 243

K^Srt Mother lndia callin9 her **> *"* p.)(especially American-dominated) capitalism (Figure 74). The narratives arising from such a relationship may revolve around the mother giving birth to and nourishing her son; leaving him a life-long dependency and an obligation to pay her back ; feelings of violation and loss of honour and pride when the mother/nation encounters external threats, and the projection of a final remstatement of right and order through the son's awakening and empowerment. The language of Hindutva cultural nationalism relies heavily

on the figure of the mother as the guarantor and keeper of tradition and spirituality of Indian' ethos. This attribute of preservation has been confined to the domain of the interior, while the son is positioned within the public and political sphere.37 I pointed out before that Hindutva's employment of Bharat Mata as a powerful wish-image', especially regarding her association with Hindu Goddesses like Kali or Durga, derived from the time of British colonization

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244 EMPOWERING VISIONS and and- colonial agitation. As such a hybrid avatar, Bharat Mata came to be particularly attributed with the efficacy of a war-goddess that was consequently related to both patriotic self-empowerment and sacred rituals of human sacrifice. Bharat Mata was displayed as one who claimed lives and called her sons for battle. Around 1900, the national icon started to be commodified by various agents in order to make nationhood visible and desirable for a rising bourgeois audience. The 'wish-image' of Bharat Mata rapidly entered the spheres of public culture and politics, where it circulated in poster art, theatre, poetry and later, film.38 The colonial rulers were both fascinated and sceptical of this ambivalent figure that could cover an emotional width from bloody sacrifice to physical beauty and chastity.39 In the first decade of the twentieth century, the aesthetics of Indianness were linked to individual initiatives for a radical nationalism that were grounded on self-sacrifice and even militancy. In 1907, for instance, a painting named Blessings Amidst Torture, in academic style by an artist named Chattopadhyay, was published in the Indian nationalist journal Prabasi.41 It depicts a freedom fighter tortured by British police, and while standing firm and looking up to the sky, he is showered with heavenly blessings from Mother India seated on a lion. The presentation of the son being blessed by his mother as a result of his spiritual firmness and familial loyalty suggests a kind of fulfilment that helped the victim to belittle physical torture and even death in the sight of divine pleasure. At the same time, the 'geobody' of the female nation became a sign and site of moral qualities in terms of physical torture, the embodiment for inscriptions of political concepts and spiritual experiences.42 Torture was not only visualized as an act carried out on the body of the male martyr, but also appeared in images of Bharat Mata. Nationalist imagery of the 1940s and 1950s, for example, is inhabited by references to her rape and mutilation, an iconography based on the experience of ethnic pre- and post-independence riots and the traumatic event of Partition itself. Partition reinforced metaphors of Mother India's dismemberment and appealed to her sons to resist this fragmentation. This is reflected in the following lines from former RSS leader Golwalkar: 'How can a son forget and sit idle when the sight of his mutilated mother stares him in the face every day? Forget? No true son can ever forget, or rest till she becomes once again her complete whole'.43 This quote bears a similarity

to Aurobindo Ghose's letter to his wife, Mrinalini Devi (30 August 1905), in which the poet associated cartographic threat to vampirism and to the grotesque iconography of neo-gothic Victorianism: 'I look upon my country as the Mother. I adore her . . . What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother's breast and started sucking her blood?'44 However, love poems dedicated to the Mother, such as those by Golwalkar or Chose as well as another example published in the Organiser in the 1950s, also suggested an identification of national devotion to the mother's body in MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 245 terms of an 'eroticized nationalism'45 ('We're one body in theethy heroes brave and free'), the duty to protect the mother ('How our conscience blushes when we fail in duty'), and the readiness to sacrifice oneself ('We hug danger for thee ... to bathe in thy God-light! ') .46 Love for the nation, so the suggestion went, could transform the weak into firm, iron men. In fact, in her study on Tamil nationalist rhetoric, Ramaswamy argues that: 'If nationalism is a structure of sentiment that turns around longing and belonging, such regimes of desire which eroticize the imagined community of the citizenry are critical to the ideologies of the nation'.47 A nationalist poem of the early years of India's independence elucidates Ramaswamy's argument in that it addresses the fusion of male desire and ascetic devotion in nationalist enthusiasm with regard to the newly gained national sovereignty. The lines reflect the intention to rid society of collective weakness and fear of effeminacy through the power of racial and spiritual superiority: No more weakness! Ay, no more fear! The strength is here! The goal is near! To truth we pour our liberation.... Children of immortality, Living lamps of Divinity! Come, let us be a super-race, By godly life and sacrifice!48 However, it is also worth mentioning that the 'matriot' iconography of Mother India and her sons-as-soldiers was not only popular among Hindutva organizations. One example is that of the National Cadet Corps who advertised for new recruits in the 1960s, during the time of India's wars with Pakistan and China by printing a poster with Bharat Mata and the map of India. Heroic national martyrs such as Bhagat Singh and Subhas Chandra Bose pay devotion to her as ordinary soldiers march towards the war.49 Martyrdom as testimony and 'final resort of the weak' In Hindutva rhetoric, martyrdom is clearly gendered as a 'male domain'. In the following pages, the intrinsic relationship between martyrdom and ideas of

male personhood shall be explored as regards their rootedness in Hindutva ideology, iconography and present-day political reinterpretations. Interestingly enough, there is no explicit concept of martyrdom in Hindu religious thought and practices. Instead, what Hindu nationalists claim to be an essential Hindu model of agency is a montage and reinterpretation of several concepts of

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martyrdom that have been appropriated from politics and other religious beliefs and practices. The notion of 'dynamic devotion as a device to legitimize (Hindu) aggression therefore plays a key role, and shall be discussed as it finds expression in politicized spiritual concepts such as satyagraha (e.g., Mohandas K Gandhi's concept of non-violent search for, or performative display of, 'truth', see below), or the iconography and metaphors of the head-sacrifice that were appropriated and altered from Christian and Sikh traditions and thought (see below). In all these models, martyrdom comes to be depicted as an agent's active response resulting from his (rarely 'her') confrontation with states of emergency, as the 'final resort' in opposing a quasi-tyrannical system. Through self-sacrifice, the martyr does not only become a representative of a social group but also constitutes it by providing it with a narrative of self-defence and purpose. Dynamic devotion of Men with a capital 'M' The author of a book on the vedas distributed by the RSS states: 'Patriotism requires the son of the soil to sacrifice his personal benefits at the altar of national ones. . . (Men should) go to the extent of even dedicating their full lives for her [Mother India's] sake'.50 In this quote, martyrdom-as-patriotism is presented as an ancient concept. Furthermore, borders between selfhood and nationality are blurred to the point of their invisibility. At the core of the argument lies the suggestion that legitimate citizenship can only be claimed if the body of the nation is identical with the body of each and every citizen, when the world becomes a temple, as much as each individual becomes a place of nation-worship (see Figures 18 and 53). However, a video like GMH also combines metaphors of the temple with the battlefield, worship with 'warship', and weakness with cowardliness. In the following quote, this pairing is achieved by linking manliness to devotional nationalism and impotency to anti-national parasitism: 'He who does not possess spirit of patriotism does not deserve to be called a man. He is worse than a beast. He who does not owe allegiance to the land in whose lap he is born and brought up, is called a traitor'.51 Although the Jain Studios' videos refrain from using such explicit hate-speech, the voiceover commentary's reference to manhood/nationhood as being intrinsically linked to the recognition of Bharat Mata and Ram as national icons alerts the viewer to similar associations. Those who do not adhere to this obligation are either referred to as ungrateful or disrespectful, thus humiliating the Hindu sentiment.

This notion of collective humiliation links the alleged suffering of the Hindu people to martyrdom as both sacred devotion and militant masculinity. RSS leader M S Golwalkar defines 'dynamic devotion' as 'a spirit of readiness to sacrifice our all for the protection of the freedom and honour of every speck of this motherland'.52 This is clearly in reference to Veer Savarkar's writings on the sacredness of territory as well as the religious concept of shakti-pithas (resorts or seats of the divine) (Chapter 4). Furthermore, Golwalkar adapts the idea of martyrdom to elaborate a magical 'protection-shield' and countermodels of agency and remembrance with respect to Mughal invasion, British colonialism, and separatism: '[I]s not every speck of our land protected and purified by the sacred blood of countless heroes and martyrs/' To prevent the 'deterioration' of the national spirit, Golwalkar issues the following appeal: Let us re-live those great ideals [of deshbhakti]. Let us shake off the present-day emasculating notions and become real living men, bubbling with national pride. . . . Only such a band of young men fired with a missionary zeal can rouse our people to action and ward off the grave perils threatening our country from inside and outside. . . . Today, more than anything else, Mother needs such menyoung, intelligent, dedicated and more than all virile and masculine. . . And such are the men who make historymen with a capital 'M'. Golwalkar's concept of 'dynamic devotion' was echoed in a conversation with Rohit M, a developmental filmmaker with close ties to the Deendayal Research Institute in New Delhi. He explained to me why in We Can Give Up Our Lives . . ., in his opinion, the kar sevaks of the flag-hoisting agitation in Ayodhya 1990 were projected and perceived themselves as standing with their backs to the wall. In his view, they had been left with the choice of either surrendering to or resisting the so-called secular terror and Muslim-instigated humiliation. Here, aggressive speech and violent action are legitimized in the light of the defensive agency forced upon them. This attitude enabled a depiction of the aggressive kar sevaks' 'voluntary' martyrdom as, to use the words of Carl Ernst in his discussion of Islamic martyrdom, 'the final resort of the weak against the powerful'. Responding to the question of why the kar sevaks had become martyrs, Rohit M (RM) said that it was: RM:... because they [the kar sevaks] took the initiative. They were the first to do it. They were in the offensive mood. 25 per cent were in the offensive mood and 75 per cent were in the defensive mood ... The way people have been interested in Hinduism in the last decadethat was because of the so-called aggressive stand it has taken up to in the last ten, fifteen years. But that aggressive stand is a momentary one, it's for the cause of justice. Aggressiveness is not the essence of Hinduism. Certainly it is noti But of course, when you are in a back-to-the-wall kind of

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situation, then ultimately you become offensive, to save your own life. But the essence of Hinduism lies in something very different.

CB: But who is actually offending? Who's pushing the Hindus with their back to the wall? RM: See, it's not a question of the last ten or five years. It's the history and all that. This situation hasn't arrived here in just five or ten years. What you are looking at is not the result of that. It's been putting and building up in hundreds of years. And now because you have a democratic system you can put your voice on. You know?! This is why you know that now it's happening. Because in this democracy you have the common history that can proceed. So all of a sudden 25 per cent of Hindus think that now is the right time to do the protest, and that protest vote changes the central government, and with the change of central government the world recognizes it [Hindutva's legitimacy]. But it's not a truth that it happened just in a matter of fifteen years. We are in a transition phase. CB: In every movement you need people who are in the offensive!? RM: Absolutely! Within the Freedom Struggle also. I don't think the whole of India was so aggressive . . . One fourth was in an aggressive mood, the others were not opposing this kind of movement but they were not very aggressive to commit themselves to the public. I think that kind of situation happened in the Freedom Struggle. The same kind of thing is here: one third of the society has to become aggressive at a certain point.
56

To 'awaken' the Hindu people, and release them from their back-to-thewall position, according to Rohit M, required the leadership of a small segment of society, aggressive men instantly reacting to the crisis of national identity. In the interview, they are portrayed as having voluntarily chosen to stage their anger and suffering in a public, that is, in a highly visible and crisis-loaded context so that the 'rest' of Hindu society could recognize the signs of martyrdom. Furthermore, the remark that 'we are in a transition phase' is directly linked to the transformative energy of public rituals staged in the context of the Ayodhya controversy. This idea of ritual dynamic enabled Rohit M to legitimize violence as a performative tool of change for the alleged welfare of the nation. In Chapter 3, attention was focused on the idea of intervisuality as an aesthetic activity underlying Jain Studios' issue-based videos and Hindutva rhetoric in general. The dynamics of visual production as a form of social practice and constitution of meaning also become evident in the context of the iconography of masculinity. Narratives of the creation of order through violence appear at a point when the state has allegedly failed to install order, thus inviting criminality, corruption, state lethargy and police brutality. They found similar articulation in parallel domains of cultural production of that time, such as commercial film in India. The theme of the 'angry young man' had already been taken up in films of the 1970s and 1980s.57 But in the 1990s, this subject matter reached a new level in which masculinity through violence

became almost glorified. Heroes, played by Hindi film actors like Nana Patekar, were depicted as war-machines, as Indian Rambos or Schwarzeneggers, frustrated and disenchanted with the world as it was, and dedicated to challenge injustice by becoming guerrilla fighters. The image of the machine-like warrior impacted on an ideal-typical model of manhood58 and could well have served as an imaginary point of reference for the identification of those young Hindu men from the lower middle classes who presented themselves as warriors (Ram bhaktas) in the Ayodhya controversy. If we go back to Hindutva rhetoric, here too, feelings of anger and frustration are invoked and linked to the demand for self-defence and a militarization of thought and practice, as well as language. B L Sharma, VHP activist and former member of parliament (BJP; Rajya Sabha) explains: 'I cannot save my children if I'm not a warrior. You cannot save a temple if there are no arms with you'. Similarly to Rohit M, he proposed that every nation required both people who could preserve knowledge (Brahmans) and those who could defend the nation with their lives (Kshatriyas, warriors). In the colonial context of Hindu revivalism and the post-colonial predicament of Hindutva, the rather transcendental idea of devotional self-sacrifice (tyaaga), generally restricted to the domain of ritualized spiritual thought and practice, especially dharma and asceticism, was shifted to the domain of militant action for a national cause. This shift is present in the following comment by Ramesh K, coscriptwriter of We Can Give Up Our Lives..., on the kar sevaks that were killed in the encounter with police in 1990: 'The sacrifice of our life is not a problem. But our soul should be prompted and boosted with the promise. (. . .) This is not any temple, but the nation. It is a question of nation, culture, and all these things. . . .'60 Hindutva martyrology feeds on multiple sites of meaning by adapting and transforming concepts of metaphysical salvation (moksha) to the domain of inner-worldly agency. The dichotomy of renouncer versus householder is collapsed in the hybrid composition of the kar sevak. The individual duty of the renouncer to uphold cosmological order by living a devout and religious life came to be identified with the householder's duty to sacrifice himself for the family and the citizen's compulsion to serve the nation. Through the selfless protection of national welfare, a form of agency defined as the main motor and

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goal of mundane agency, a man could become a hero (vira, sura, or shahid) and be acknowledged as such.

The meaning of the pledge In the videos, the concept of heroic selfless death is enhanced as an important choreographic element for the creation of a martyr's cult. The kar sevaks are depicted as agents bound to their pledge, that is, their dedication to liberate Mother India, and the birthplace of Ram. The pledge serves as a central point of reference not only in the title of We Can Give Up Our Lives But Can't Break Our Vow itself, but is also evident in many songs, footage presenting individual statements of kar sevaks and voice-over commentary such as 'We take the vow in the name of Ram that we will make the temple there'. As another form of ritual practice, the event of a publicly performed pledge was meant to enhance the idea of a dedicated fraternal community. The ritualistic device of the pledge has already been constituted as part of a narrative that was to mark the birth and affirm the strength of revolutionary or nationalist movements in Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century. In addition to the key motifs of battle and rebellion, executions and massacres and coronation, the oath figured centrally in the symbolic constitution of national sovereignty, for example, in Switzerland.62 The pledge of the warrior to defend his motherland or fatherland was also part of the 'blood-and-soil' (Blut-und-Boden) ideology and cults of the dead in German Fascism. As an expression of absolute loyalty and dedication to 'truthfulness' it also plays a major role in Hindutva spokespeople's concern with 'indigenous' models of self-empowerment and resistance; the idea of satyagraha. Redefining truthfulness As outlined above, the language of Hindu nationalist martyrology is based upon various social and religious models. There is, for example, the renounced warrior or mystic as he is described in Chattopadhyay's novel Anandamath; the pilgrim-soldier (Ram bhakta) at war; the son protecting the honour of his motherland; and the freedom fighter, or the satyagrahi (one holding firmly to the truth) practising 'soul-force' and non-violence (ahimsa). They all merge in the creolized figure of the kar sevak as he is projected in We Can Give Up Our Lives.... The symbolic meaning of the pledge as a model of dedication and solidarity frames narratives and performances and gives them order as well as drama. Its association with dedication and truthfulness links it to another model of agency that shaped the notion of martyrdom in Hindutva audiovisual rhetoric. For example, in The Truth Shall Not Be Touched, by referring it to satyagraha, the kar sevak's agency with regard to the Ayodhya controversy is coupled with both religious pilgrimage and political campaign, depicting the kar sevak both as peaceful pilgrim and freedom fighter. Likewise, We Can Give Up Our Lives. . . displays footage of violent encounters between kar sevaks and police forces as the latter blocked the road to prevent the Hindutvavadis' proceeding to the disputed site. An interview between cameraman Rahul T and a kar sevak heightens the tension of the video narrative when the informant tells the

running camera: 'We were performing a satyagraha on the street peacefully, but they started shooting us. We were told not to resort to any form of violence. So we got hit at, and innocent people were being killed'. And 'while we were watching the video together, Ramesh K, the scriptwriter to this video added: "Without order police fired, although Ram bhaktas (devotees of Ram) were just chanting! They are firing at bhaktas who were empty-handed' (see Figures 75 and 76). Such examples provoke memories of encounters between Indians and British military during the Freedom Struggle, especially Mohandas K Gandhi's notion of satyagraha as a civil disobedience movement against the British opponents, which implied the importance of bringing about a change of heart and mind in the opponent through self-suffering. They refer pilgrimage as a national-political event to Gandhi's concept of active non-violence (ahimsa) and resistance in the context of the struggle for independence. Identifying him with the satyagrahi, the kar sevak could be said to know and hold the Truth. Furthermore, through his action, he could reveal and confront the injustice of the oppressing enemy by presenting himself as ready to face torture and even death, like the freedom fighter depicted in the aforementioned journal Prabasi (1907). The key thought behind this is that such non-violent behaviour would bring about a change of attitude in the opponent or oppressor. The projection of the kar sevaks' martyrdom as a consequence arising from their alleged satyagraha in We Can Give Up Our Lives... finds its most dramatic appeal in the juxtaposition of footage of their purported non-violent passivity with that of the lathicharging police, the shooting, and finally the dead kar sevaks and the bloodstained streets of Ayodhya (Figures 77, 78). This model of agency can be aligned to what Werner Schiffauer refers to as a central element of martyrdom, that is, 'passive activism'. Even though the videos enhance the image of kar sevaks as peaceful freedom fighters, the concept of satyagraha could not find support among all segments within the Sangh Parivar. Commenting on non-violence (ahimsa) as a sufficient strategy to challenge the secular government, B L Sharma (BLS) strengthened his emphasis on the synthesis of sacred knowledge and martial ethics for Hindutva pragmatism. In our conversation, he came up with a definition of ahimsa that differed from Gandhi's insofar as he demanded a redefinition of the term in order to legitimize physical violence:

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EMPOWERING VISIONS Figure 75 Police forces clash with kar sevaks on the streets of Ayodhya. Still from We Can Give Up Our Lives . , . Figure 76 Ibid. Figure 77 Trails of blood on the streets of Ayodhya. Still from We Can Give Up Our Lives . . . MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS

253
Figure 78 Three 'underdog' kar sevaks lying in a side-street of Ayodhya, Still from We Can Give Up Our Lives . . .

CB: Violence in the country of (M K) Gandhi?

BLS: Yes, yes! Gandhi also believed in that! He demanded ahimsa. Ahimsa does not mean that if somebody comes and takes my wife, I can say okay, thik hai, lejaye [alright, take her]! That's not dharma. Aaaarhh (he raises his voice), it will not be loved! The enemy should not have that spirit to come into your home. You should be sooo powerfulthat is real ahimsal Ahimsa does not mean that if somebody slaps you, you say 'okay'. If somebody tries my daughter I say, 'okay, it's a common property for everyone, okay, I only want peace'. But we don't want the peace of a graveyard! ... Only brave persons can maintain peace. If you want peace in this world, you have to be strong! CB: What does that mean? Does it mean that Gandhi was not brave? BLS: No, no! He may have been brave in his own way, but people [today] reject it. CB: But what is the solution? BLS: The solution is: Be strong, work on, teach everybody that we are all one!! Come along, let us embrace the entire world, the universe is one! Lord is one! The main idea is: If I say, 'my Gita [Bhagavad Gita, a key scripture on Hindu thought] is above all'that is wrong. If you say, 'my Bible is above all'it is wrong. If somebody says, 'if you don't believe

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254 EMPOWERING VISIONS in the Bible you will be slain'... If I say, 'if you don't believe in the Gita you'll be slain' . . . We don't say that. We say, 'let us coexist'. Try to understand each and everyone. Truth is one, there can be different ways to reach the Truth. But Islam says, 'the Qur'an is the only path!'. Christians say, 'the bible is the only path'. It is not that... The thing lies with Hindus themselves. They have to come out with their knowledge, all right, we could not get a chance for the last 1,200 years: this is the humanity. This is GOD! . . . We are not fundamentalists in that! CB: But what do you think about the claim that the VHP is militant? BLS: No! Militant in the sense, they say about this Ramjanmabhoomi and all that: we don't want to harm anybody. But we should see that no one should harm us! That's all. We don't want to touch anybody, we will not allow anybody to touch us! We should be like a hot iron, nobody should be able to touch it. That's all!66 In this excerpt from a personal interview, we find an identification of national community with somatic metaphors, that is, the 'harmed body' of the Hindu people that should be metamorphosed into a 'hot iron' in order to 'defend' itself sufficiently. There are also references to the idea of the external threat to society-as-family, in particular held together through women, and the appeal to men to defend them. Associations also bear similarity to Rohit M's aforementioned elaboration of the Hindu people pushed against an invisible wall and drawing upon their last resources in order to defend themselves. Religion as a marker of the alleged 'Hindu sentiment' in terms of tolerance is here too. The complexity of Sharma's response indicates that the idea of martyrdom unfolds in ongoing acts of negotiation. But most of all, it requires scope for pathos (instead of reflection) in order to mobilizenot for diplomacy or

peacebut for battle. We Can Give Up Our Lives... carries footage of a public speech by Ashok Singhal (General Secretary, VHP). Addressing kar sevaks in Ayodhya, he pledges: And if hundreds of thousands have to give up their lives, then we are ready for it!' As the video footage documents how he receives victorious applause from the audience, the video as a whole comes to serve as a 'hot iron', both a warning to the enemies, and an appeal to. those seeking strength, a verbal and visual phantasmagoria of violence and blood. The legitimization of violence and sacrifice for the constitution of a Utopian community demands the dramatization and polarization of 'justice' and 'injustice'. For this, particular formulas are needed. The amalgamation of various models of 'truthful' sacrifice have been mentioned above, one of which is satyagraha. In the introduction to her extensive edited volume on comparative MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 255 martyrdom, Elisabeth Wood emphasizes that the frames of reference for the creation of martyrs and martyrdom have changed with the times and contexts. In the previous paragraphs we could see how non-violence and violence are negotiated in the context of the 1990 kar seva. As a mode of representation and authorization of'truth', popular martyrologies generally rely on ostensible eyewitness reports, and the footage of Rahul T's interview of the kar sevak commenting on satyagraha in We Can Give Up Our Lives... affirms the video's role as a 'modern martyrology'. The eyewitness report can be found in the hagiographies of early Christianity and Greek Antiquity. In the South Asian context, community-constitution by means of martyrdom plays a central role in Sikh scriptures, for example, the Adi Granth or Bhai Gurdas. The earliest manifestation of this text appeared in the seventeenth century AD, and became of increasing importance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it became closely related to the anti-colonial and national movement in North India.6 The figure of the martyr as a witness to injustice crystallizes in another concept, that of the shahid: 'The shahid is one who dies heroically, testifying to his or her faith on the path of God'.69 However, this term had been appropriated from Arabic, in the Qur'an the 'witness' is the one who testifies and observes for Allah and the Prophet Muhammad. The noun 'shahid', says Fenech, 'has been used in the Indian subcontinent for well over 500 years... To this day ... there is no Indian-language noun for the witness as signifying one who dies for his or her faith'. With regards to Hindutva martyrdom and nationalist devotion, the figures of the shahid and bhakta provide yet another symbolic and iconographie layer of meaning that can be reinterpreted and displayed. Appropriating the inner sanctum sanctorum of the kar sevak Ram is the eternal truth, he's the ideal man. The construction of the temple it will not just be outside us. It will be inside of us. A temple has to be built in each of us. Our rajya [rule, kingdom] has to become Ram rajya (Ram's rule). Everyone has to become Ram. We have to inculcate the personality of Ram in each of us. In ancient times you could have one Ram as king. Today we are a democracyevery citizen has to be Ram! Then only can we have Ram rajya, the rule of Ram. One of the crucial reasons behind the exploitation of the notion of martyrdom in Hindutva rhetoric, particularly in the context of the Ramjanmabhoomi controversy, was that it further enabled Sangh Parivar spokespeople to commodify and claim possession over personal devotion. Some key images related to utmost religious dedication and loyalty, as they appear repeatedly in video script and imagery, shall thus be analysed in more detail.

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IIMIIIIIIIIIIMIIIIMII
Script and footage of We Can Give Up Our Lives . . . reveal a visual and metaphorical landscape of bloodstained martyrdom from which two key motifs appear time and again that can be traced back to revivalist Hinduism during colonial rule. There is the reference to the kar sevak as Ram bhakt (devotee), opening his chest to reveal that his heart has been transformed into a seat of gods and goddesses, a visualization of the above quote from GMH. We also find the motif of the sacrifice of the head directly related to the idea of sacred battle in the martial persona of the shahid (see Figure 18). The attempt to visualize devotion and to furnish these images with authority is not specifically 'Indian'. In ancient Greece, Socrates is said to have mentioned shops that sold little figurines that could be 'opened up down the middle of folded back, and then they show inside them, images of the gods'. The Middle Ages in Northern Europe, according to anthropologist Alfred Gell, had something called vierges ouvrantes: Our Lady would open her chest to reveal Jesus Christ. Catholic 'sacred heart' iconography features Christ and Mary opening their chests. But Christian iconography has no depiction of martyrs wrenching their chests open. Rare examples of an iconography that montaged the heart onto the martyr are those of Gertrude of Helfta and Ignatius of Antioch.73 Despite its European roots, the iconography of the devotee opening his chest seems to have suited the needs of its Indian producers to relate devotional nationalism or, to use Golwalkar's term 'dynamic devotion', to personal devotion. The motif of the martial warrior dedicating his head to the guru or god/dess seems more specifically regional, though equally syncretic in its structure. Alfred Gell points out that a picture, in its function as an idol, should be treated as an agent itself, attributed with spirit, soul and ego.74 In this respect he also mentions the concept of the mind as 'a person contained within a person'. Similarly to Pinney,76 Gell talks of the body becoming an 'indexical form of the mind'. Although attributes could be externally fixed, as in memorial photography or popular prints, they must be understood as markers of an internal state of being. These attributes could work as 'eye-openers' for the viewer, to make him or her understand the 'inner conception of agency', of imagination as a part of social practice. An examination of the iconography of nationalist devotion is relevant to the subject matter. Therefore, let us take a look at the leitmotif of the mythological figure Hanuman, known as Rama's most faithful devotee (Ram bhakt) and leader of the monkey army who supported Ram in his battle against Ravana by providing him not only with loyalty, but also putting a whole army of his monkey soldiers at his disposal. Popular poster iconography displays Hanuman as he opens his chest to reveal his deepest object of devotion: Ram and his wife Sita (see Figure 18). Figure 79 Bhagat Singh opening his chest. Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi, Photographic

Collection (No. 36512).

Many of the anti-colonial posters produced and distributed after 1930, particularly following the hanging of Bhagat Singh and the death of his comrades, carried references to Christian iconography. Based upon this motif, prints of the 1930s display the young boy Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary who was imprisoned and hanged by the British during the Freedom Struggle (Figure 79). Dressed in a Western suit (to escape British prosecution he once had to camouflage himself as an Indian sahib [master]) and a turban, signifying his Sikh origin, he opens his 'sanctum sanctorum', thereby revealing a portrait photograph of himself as a man wearing his 'logo', a Western-style hat. This montage collapses the short life of Bhagat Singh and comrades into one image, the boy and the man, shortly before he was arrested and hanged by the British. Bhagat Singh and his comrades foughtand diedfor a Socialist Republic in India. Their ideas on militant activism were not evolved to create a nationalist movement on the basis of a particular ethno-religious agenda. Rather, they envisaged India's sovereignty to be carried out by an international community

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lllllllllllllllllllllll
of workers engaged in socialist revolutionary activities.77 Today, they are displayed and perceived as martyrs who died for the Indian nation, and particularly Bhagat Singh enjoys great popularity within BJP propaganda. The iconographie make-up of this image leads us to European medieval and votive Sacred Heart iconography that was introduced to India by Jesuit and other Christian missionary activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, it would be too facile to assume that images bring along with them a ready-made set of information and meaning, decodable in only one way, whatever context they were to be placed in. Possibly, this iconography of a Ram bhakt was evolved by Indian popular artists, around the 1920s, through their possible familiarity with Christian iconography. Yet, it was not so much an interest in Christianity as such; or Christian devotional practice in particular, that would have led to this adaptation. Rather, a fascination with and curiosity about new forms of expression that had been enabled and circulated by new global media technologies would have impacted on this mimetic act. The iconography of the Sacred Heart seemed an adequate aesthetic solution for the mimesis and altered representation of a person's innermost beliefs. Despite the anti-colonial content of many visual messages of that time, they regularly displayed references to Victorian fairy tales and children's books in the style of Grandville, compositions of classicist and romanticist Symbolism that circulated in the domain of the Indian upper and middle classes in mass reproduced media such as journals.78 Again, rather than identifying with the content of those pictures, foreign technologies and iconography were appreciated by many image-makers and ideologues, for its potential to create a new 'think-space' in which notions of struggle, death and paradise, salvation and devotion could be commodified as 'wish-images'. Following Benjamin's arguments on the mimetic faculty of new media technologies, it could be argued

that the aforementioned processes enhanced identity constitution by providing new means of visualization and representation, thus contributing to a patterning of ways of seeing and experiencing. Images of headless 'extreme nationalism' And once you step onto this path, you may well give up your head, rather than the cause ... He who is martyred in such a fight attains to such bliss that even the holiest of the holy yogis would envy. One key metaphor of self-sacrifice with regard to the Ayodhya controversy was the sacrifice of a heroic warrior's life in the gesture of offering his head to the object of devotion, that is, the nation personified, and sanctified in Durga or Bharat Mata. In both God Manifests Himself and We Can Give Up Our Lives. .., there are constant references in songs, voice-over commentary and speeches to the gesture of head sacrifice in order to suggest sacred battle and self-sacrifice for the nation. For example, in God Manifests Himself, we see and hear the highly charismatic VHP spokeswoman Sadhvi Rithambhara appealing to the audience of kar sevaks: 'We can behead ourselves. But we can not lower our heads'. In its songs and imagery, We Can Give Up Our Lives... also repeatedly reveals metaphors related to the sacrifice of the head in lines such as: 'Take my head too!' The image of the decapitated warrior-as-heroic-martyr is the dramatized form of the Ram bhakt opening his chest as well as the satyagrahi who exposes injustice by means of his or her 'passive activism'. VHP activist and artist Satyanarayan Maura explains the symbolical meaning behind the headsacrifice: 'It means: "Our whole life, please take it!" Extreme patriotism! Living for the nation, for Ramour whole life and work is for the nation. The head symbolizes our life: extreme nationalism'. While the motif of the hero opening his chest could be seen as the moderate version of self-dedication, the idea of head-sacrifice, as it was employed in the context of the Ayodhya controversy, can be aligned to Golwalkar's concept of 'dynamic devotion' and militant masculinity. Both prototypical images had already been evolved in the first decades of the twentieth century, as a result of a fusion of ideas of religious and political devotionalism for the purpose of mobilization. The image of head-sacrifice journeyed from its employment in devotional iconography to anti-colonial rhetoric, to its use for appeals to Indian soldiers in the wars against China and Pakistan in the 1960s, to the Sangh Parivar's fight against 'pseudo-secularism' in the 1980s.82 In most of those popular prints, warrior-kings, gurus or revolutionaries of different political colour offer their heads to Bharat Mata. Around 1990, in order to dramatize the notion of sacred violence, of the battle for truth fought by 'Ram's devotees', Hindutva rhetoric came to rely on iconographie sources from Sikh popular culture and hagiographies. The visually and verbally narrated history of a martial Sikhism on display as manifest, for example, in countless popular prints or children books, is imbued with references to the heroic martyrdom and legendary capacity of the Sikh people to face endless torture by Mughal oppressors. Among the heroic martyrs is, for instance, Deep Singh who, to prevent the desecration of gurdwaras and to resist tyranny of foreign oppression, fought the Afghan army in the second half of the eighteenth century. The legend goes that he was decapitated but continued to fight the battle. Carrying his head in one hand while killing his enemies with the sword in his other, he only stopped, and died, upon reaching the sacred city of Amritsar (Figure 80) .83 The elaboration of a militant rhetoric of Hindu nationalism and the idea of martyrdom's glory in the context of Hindutva reveals the adaptation of a (self-) stigmatized perception and depiction of Sikh

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260 EMPOWERING VISIONS Figure 80 Baba Deep Singh. Bazaar print, published by Brrjbasi & Sons, New Delhi. Private collection. thought and practice. There is a great affinity towards the concept of the Khalsa, the Sikh brotherhood, based on ideas of martial ethics and arts that evolved within the context of Sikh opposition to Mughal superiority, when Muslim rulers enforced mass conversion of Hindus to Islam.84 In the late 1990s, for example, the VHP began to distribute small trichuls (tridents) at trichul dakshina events (public initiation rituals) to young men from its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal. They were to be carried around shoulder and neck in the same way as the Idrpan (a small dagger), one of the five key symbols of Khalsa identity. Sikhs further enjoy the reputation of being a community based upon ideals of high discipline and loyalty. In her exploration of the Sikh militant discourse, Veena Das argues that the Sikh martyr became an ideal-typical figure for someone who represented the community's fight for justice and 'whose sacrifices have fed the community with its energy'.85 Interestingly, she also notes that popular martyrologies of Sikhism depict the Hindus as effeminate and weak, as people MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 261 who require protection, whereas the Muslims are portrayed as an aggressive opponent who is equally strong and martial in character as the Sikh. Hindutva ideology and pragmatism employed similar strategies for political mobilization and sanctification of those who fell victim to unjust' governance. But visual and verbal rhetoric differ from real-political circumstances. With the underdog kar sevak, on which our attention is focused now, lying dead in the gutter, the video camera exposes the bloodstains that surround him and his body in all detail. The camera paints a picture of a deserted battlefield. It seems as if there is no alliance between ideal and status quo, even though the voice-over commentary in We Can Give Up Our Lives. . . attempts to create a sacred space and enhance rituals of sanctification in order to suggest postmortem heroism. Worlds seem to lie between the staged, clean martyrdom on posters and in speeches and the actual scenes of conflict, where we see footage of/car sevaks' blood merging with the dirt in the gutter of a narrow alley. The notion of 'clean', heroic martyrdom had been quickly added to the dead kar sevaks of the clashes in Ayodhya in 1990, like layers of colour added onto a black and white memorial or wedding photograph in order to remove wrinkles on a face. The war lords who added this colour, have left the stage silently and with clean hands, smiling graciously while giving interviews on the aims and profits of sacrifices. A rather sad vision of salvation. The short afterlife of the anonymous 'underdog' ... the kar sevaks were shot at close range in the head and chest. This was uncalled forand close-ups of their mangled bodies and spilled blood have provided wonderful propaganda material for the VHP and BJE We Can Give Up Our Lives. . . composes and displays a detailed topography of dead bodies of kar sevaks. The camera-eye reveals a painfully close relationship in the devastated street scenes after the clashes of kar sevaks and paramilitary forces happened in Ayodhya on 2 November 1990. It delivers a detailed, almost intimate, study of bloodstains, wounds, cracked open skulls, open eyes of the dead, of mutilated bodies lying in the alleys of Ayodhya (Figures 81-84). Some shots show almost decomposed bodies after they had been dragged out

of the holy river Saryu, where theyso the voice-over commentary explains had been secretly dumped by the police and paramilitary forces in order to hide their violent actions. Accompanying these shots, one song speaks of thousands of uncounted heads being sacrificed and a voice demands: 'Take my head, too!' Instrumental, sad tunes accompany the images and increase the feeling of horror and tragedy. It is almost as if the camera's eye had become the viewer's eye, with no space for protection or chance for withdrawal between

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262 EMPOWERING VISIONS Figure 81 Kar sevak. Still from We Can Give Up Our Lives ... Figure 82 Ibid. Figure 83 Ibid. Figure 84 Ibid. the two. Possibly, one could not get any closer to Walter Benjamin's analogy of the camera eye with the surgeon's operation tool. In order to support the idea in the audiences that the acts of the government had not only been enacted against the supporters of the movement but also addressed the Indian people as a whole, interviewees emphasized ongoing suffering and announced further martyrdom. One man angrily addresses the camera, in tears because of the loss of his nephew who died in encounter with paramilitary and police forces at the kar seva of 1990 (see Figure 85). His relative, so he accuses, had been 'executed': What kind of government is this?! Was he not a citizen of India? Does the police not belong to us too?! We had come, prepared to die. It would have been all right if he had died on the street, fighting the police. But to be dragged out of a house and then shot, what kind of justice is this?! Thus, the focus of governmental attention was on the kar sevaks. When police and paramilitary forces started firing at kar sevaks on 2 November, many RSS workers and Bajrang Dal activists sought refuge in homes of Sangh Parivar MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 263 Figure 85 (Ibid.). Witness reborting on the clashes with police and paramilitary forces supporters. Yet paramilitary forces and police tracked some of them down, allegedly killing some of them when they refused to leave their hiding place. The video points out that the killings and the many rumours that accompanied them made the survivors even firmer in their dedication to support the Ayodhya movementin remembrance of the victims. Returning to the pledge, Carl Ernst's statement that the rhetoric of martyrdom came to function as the 'final resort of the weak'87 finds affirmation. One kar sevak in We Can Give Up Our Uves. . . promises, and in doing so comes close to the ideal-typical model of Baba Deep Singh: 'I set out to build the temple, to protect my religion ... I won't go away until it's done!' Doubts as to the actual voluntary and conscious nature of the self-sacrifice of these young men have been expressed earlier. The victims of 30 October and 2 November 1990 also became victims of Hindutva ideology in that they were instrumentalized as weapons in a battle that was not theirs. This is not to say that they were innocent. However, they had not come prepared to die as

martyrs but to support the Sangh Parivar's call for the construction of a Ram temple at the site of the Babri mosque. Most of these young men came from upper castes and the urban lower middle class and were using Ayodhya as a stage to express their protest about the feared consequences of the Mandai Report that had been announced by Prime Minister V P Singh only two months before. They dreaded that the new quota policy, giving preference according to caste rather than economic status based on individual performance, would further fragment and destabilize society and at the same time diminish their own chances for an upwardly mobile career. At least to some extent, the Ram Rath Yatra was organized in response to the Mandai implementation.

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264 EMPOWERING VISIONS Many of the youth belonging to the Bajrang Dal appear on footage in We Can Give Up Our Lives... or From Sagar to Saryu gearing up in groups of a dozen or so to mobilize the public, on scooters or marching, carrying the Hindu flag and wearing a saffron band (Ram patti) around their heads (see Figure 15). That dedication is juxtaposed with dynamic images and metaphors of death and despair, shooting and running, shouting and screaming in We Can Give Up Our Uves. . . . Such scenes enabled the creation of an atmosphere of 'realityTV'. With the footage taken by cameraman Rahul T, who also directed GMH, the viewers are drawn into the plot as if they were looking through a virtual peephole. The insertion of elements of sacredness and holy war into such an aesthetic and closeness were to enhance feelings of shock. And indeed, sound and images attack the eye and other senses. They come across in such a dense and intense manner that it is difficult to detach oneself. As Amit Aggarwal, in an article carried by the Times of India, says about the video: 'it hits you like a hammer on the head' (20 November 1990), or-put in the Benjaminian context'goes under the viewer's skin'. Compassion, mixed with anger, was meant to emerge in the viewer in response to these pictures. Points of emotive address appear not only in the detailed study of the anatomy of death. Footage of an old man being hit by police while he tries to peacefully make his way through the wall of state forces; of sadhus being kicked in their backs, or of eyewitness reports by relatives or friends of the dead, attempt to pull viewers into a space of humiliation and threat. The people talk as if traumatized, looking into the camera with painfilled eyes. Real suffering and staged suffering are intertwined in montage, and repeatedly in the course of watching those scenes, an air of'reality TV' got hold of my imagination and empathy. To me, these people are both 'real' and 'unreal'; they are sacred messengers of a glorious utopia, placed in an apocalyptic setting on earth. The images enforce notions of a community standing with its back against the wall, with nothing left to lose, for they have givenor lost everything. The visual device of these montaged images, cutting the brutal scenes against idyllic, Arcadian images, enhance the feeling of having reached a limit where only the agency of self-sacrifice through death can lead to a solution. It seems that the BJP and Hindutva allies have created a space of death to enable transformation and mobilization in terms of agency, to be loaded with Benjaminian 'wish-images'. The figure of the underdog martyr never really rises againexcept in the video medium or speeches that turned him, post mortem, into a heroic martyr. Half a decade later, he has disappeared from those virtual spaces at the same speed as he had appeared in front of the audiences. However, our attention

shall stay focused on the strategies of evolving a cult of martyrdom around him before he was finally made to silently vanish from centre-stage. MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 265 Creating a cult of martyrdom There will be remembrance of all these kinds of people, certainly there will be. Of course, because they were the people instrumental to bringing this movement so far89 We Can Give Up Our Uves... reflects the interest of BJP and VHP spokespeople to employ the killings of 1990 for the creation of a cult of martyrdom. This new cult was meant to prolong and intensify the Sangh Parivar's emotive mobilization in the context of the Ayodhya controversy. The martyrs had been created post-mortem in order to be commodified as nationalist 'wish-images'. Yet they were pushed away at the moment when key ideologues and pragmatics felt that their appeal had diminished. Taking a closer look at We Can Give Up Our Lives . . ., it becomes evident that it is not the people who turned the kar sevaks into martyrs by evolving a cult through which they could honour and remember the dead by means of rituals, memorials, songs, poetry, popular stories and imagery. Heroes and heroic martyrs were tailored to fit into the pantheon of Hindutva by various VHP and BJP spokespeople to further provoke the secular government and to prove to the people that only the Sangh Parivar cared for and guaranteed the remembrance of the dead and acknowledged the distress of their families. First a rhetoric of revenge in the name of, and homage to, the death of 'innocent pilgrims' was staged by the BJP The BJP journal About Us stated that the party's National Council bows its head in tearful homage to the sacred memory of the Martyrs of Ayodhya. (. . .) The blood of the Ram-bhaktas shall not go in vain. (...) The BJP rededicates itself to the sacred task of rebuilding the Ram lanma Mandir at Ram Janmasthan and initiating the movement for
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establishment of Ram Rajya. We Can Give Up Our Lives . . . honoured the martyrs and survivors of the killings with slogans such as:'Don't forget the martyrs of Ayodhya!', 'Victory to the martyrs of Ayodhya' and songs filled with phrases like 'We bow our heads to the martyrs of Ayodhya who died at the banks of the river Saryu. The history of sacrifices for the birthplace is an eternal and glorious one'. The act of paying respect to the dead (sradda) was part and parcel of hero worship (viryamarga), one of the classic paths to salvation.92 In order to be legitimate, the death of a heroic martyr has to be closely aligned with a ritually, 'good death. It can be recognized as a meaningful, morally justified death when juxtaposed with the concept of suicide of an individual for alleged reasons of selfish despair and moral weakness. By means of a heroic death, followed by a proper death ritual (narayanabal), salvation can be reached directly.

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Second, a series of familiar rituals was employed and put on display for the viewer in We Can Give Up Our Lives... to suggest the Sangh's interest in the restoration of the martyr's lost honour. The video carries shots of voluntary workers pulling corpses of kar sevaks out of the holy river Saryu four days after the shootings. The voice-over commentary informs us that the military had secretly dumped the bodies in order to hide their acts. The weekly magazine Frontline reported that 'many had sandbags tied to them and bore bullet marks or other injuries . . . (and) lent credence to the suspicion that the police had dumped the dead in the river'.94 This was dynamite for the Sangh Parivar. Not only could the findings accuse the police and paramilitary forces of having abused the state's power; the fact that the dead had not been given an adequate treatment in terms of funeral pyres and death rites, was particularly hurtful and provocative to Hindu people since the death rite is an essential performative element to enable the soul to leave the body in a purified state. Towards the end of the video, in a montage, we see people carrying some of the dead bodies to a funeral pyre (Figures 86-87). There is also some footage of burning funeral fires, indicating that the martyrs had finally received what they deserved. Finally, to further translate the cult of martyrdom onto a national level and to promote the Sangh Parivar as a movement that cared for its people, the VHP initiated particular pilgrimages. Here, the bones and ashes of the cremated were taken on a journey through the country in ritual pots (asthi-kalasha) before their obligatory immersion in sacred waters. Yet, this was only one version, the 'shiny' side, of the river-findings. Another side is revealed through the story of a former Jain Studios employee who wished to remain anonymous. He reports what he had witnessed when watching some documentary footage in post-production for We Can Give Up Our Lives.. . He points out that the final version of the video did not carry any of the footage depicting those bodies that had been pulled out of the river and presented to the video camera's eye, but had then been left by the riverside without the performance of death rituals for them. The bodies thus became food for hungry dogs and vultures. The informant furthermore states that precisely this footage, when he looked for it another day, had disappeared. For the informant, despite his sympathies for the Hindutva cause, this was an evidence for the insincerity and false morality of some of the spokespeople within the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation. The third aspect of the production of a cult was related to the acknowledgement of family members' agony in order to enhance Hindutva spokespeople's own authority. As in popular prints of the 1930s and 1940s, BJP and VHP spokespeople claimed the power to 'bless' both the volunteers and their families by metamorphosing into representatives of Mother India. Figure 86 Kar sevaks receive their funeral rites (Ibid.) Figure 87 Ibid, The pain of those families who had lost their sons and husbands was paid

tribute to insofar as this gesture was considered to be profitable for the establishment of a cult of a charismatic leader. Thus, We Can Give Up Our Lives. . . informs the viewer about the inauguration of the Ayodhya Martyrs Trust. This trust was to provide support to the families of the dead kar sevaks and to keep the memory of the martyrs alive. Some footage also depicts speakers praising the 'sanctification of the killed souls' while other footage shows BJP

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268 EMPOWERING VISIONS leaders paying their homage by means of stating that those martyrs contributed to a 'great victory for Hindu society'. The voice-over commentary appeals to kar sevaks to realize the dreams of the dead: 'We have to redeem their pledge and keep advancing'. The appeal that the martyrs' 'last will' seeks realization in the remembrance as well as the deeds of their successors, adds another dramatic element to the notion of the cult. The invocation of an idea that the dead might watch and judge the deeds of the living has already been used by Swami Vivekananda, one of Hindutva politics' favourite nationalist figures: 'Millions of your ancestors are watching, as it were, every action of yours, so be alert!' Through the strategy of drawing upon the 'reciprocal' power of remembrance, Hindutva ideologues aimed at creating an anthropomorphic virtual memory as a controlling force. This 'invisible eye' or 'judge' from the past was intended to function as a tool of surveillance and to control citizens' performances. In the late 1990s, the 'cult of remembrance' also expanded into the domain of the Internet. Parts of the VHP Bharat web site are dedicated to the two Kothari brothers who died during the shooting in Ayodhya in 1990 while attempting to hoist the Hindu flag on the central dome of the Babri mosque.98 The photograph on display is a traditional memorial photograph, the montage of two studio portraits of the brothers, with tilak (sacred mark on the forehead) added and sashes displaying the words 'Bajrang Dal' to mark them as property of the VHP youth wing. Placed between the two is a print of Bharat Mata (Figure 88). The brothers are referred to as hutatama, the Sanskrit term for someone who sacrifices himself through fire ritual. The accompanying text MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 269 Figure 88 The two Kothari brothers, Photomontage (1990s). Private collection. explains: 'Ram Kumar Kothari and Anuj Sharad Kothari. Felled by the bullets of Mullah Mulayam Singh Yadav's goonda raj'. Mullah is the Arabic term for priest, but also a Hindutva swear-word for Muslims in general. In this context, however, the connotation has to be related to the mentioning of the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yadav, who ordered the arrest of L K Advani during the Ram rath yatra, and imposed several bans on Sangh activities related

to the Ayodhya controversy in the state. To increase feelings of loss and injustice in the viewers, a photograph of the Kothari brothers' parents has been placed directly beneath them. Video as a courtroom for the 'people's verdict' We Can Give Up Our Lives... increases the notion of martyrdom by continuing the tradition of popular martyrologies as both a 'moving memorial' and the documentation and celebration of martyrdom in form of an audiovisual eye witness report. The videos discussed here did not only serve as 'moving memorials' but also as 'virtual courtrooms' (Chapter 5). Through them, Hindutva ideologues attempt to display the 'people's voice' and reach a 'just' verdict for the nation's welfare by appealing to the purported Truth. In the context of this chapter, the courtroom metaphor can also be employed with respect to the fact that hagiographies often evolve around proclaimed eye witness reports of the trials of a martyr, be they of Christian or Islamic (Sufi) belief." Martyrologies are often set in a court-like context. Courts are the manifestation of the authority of law and order. In the case of verdicts spoken on a heroic martyr, courts serve as a stage for competing versions of truth and law. The martyr is both a witness to truth, faith and law and a representative of sacred justice.100 With regard to the Ayodhya controversy, contested views over the 'true' law found reflection in the video The Truth Shall Not Be Touched. Here, the interpretations of dharmic law by the Hindutva spokespeople were played out against those of secular law by the nation-state. The video is made up as a book that opens to various chapters of the Ayodhya case. Like in a court-case, claims and 'evidences' are presented to the viewer. Footage is accompanied by the authority of written, 'true' words and documents, that is, comments by 'eminent' archaeologists and historians, and quotes from historical sources such as eyewitness reports. Consensus within the audience was attempted through a voice-over claiming that 'the people of India' should be the actual judges of the case. They should create the fate of the nation: 'You have to decide, countrymen, can we continue like this? That's suicidali Or shall weon the basis of national historylay the foundation for a new brotherhood? No appeasement for anyone!' The video has come to serve as a medium to stage a passion-play as both a testimony and a court scene. Although the voice-over

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commentary claims that the video takes up the position of a 'neutral' observer, in fact, the authority or rather the dogma of voice-over commentary, songs and images openly push the viewer to such an extent that the demand for the construction of Ram's birth-temple at the spot of the mosque must be the only logical consequence. The last page of this 'video-as-book' closes with shots of loir sevaks climbing the dome of the mosque. To end the video with this symbolic gesture of claiming

foreign and alien territory does not require words of explanation. It also enables us to draw a link to the flag-hoisting scene in Unity Pilgrimage (Chapter 4) in which, symbolically, Kashmir as a 'dominated site', is transformed into a 'dominant site'. The verdict, so it seems, has already been reached and executed. The legendary appeal of martyrdom and sanctity of violence, and the invocation of the 'people's power' to reach a just verdict, show that the videos discussed here are in many ways what Michael Taussig calls the 'work of fabulation'. For Taussig, it was the ways in which fabulation or 'magical realism': 'created an uncertain reality out of fiction, giving shape and voice to the formless form of "reality" in which an unstable interplay of truth and illusion becomes a phantasmic social force'. It is important to note, however, on the basis of Michael Taussig's work on colonialism, that it is both magical realism's potential as an emancipating and ideological tool through which the dreams and desires of the colonized were to be disciplined and controlled. In our case, the underdog martyr stands at the crossroads of the dialectic relationship between the 'real' and the 'unreal', the mythic and the historical, self-empowerment and disciplining control. This potential is emphasized through the style of montage in the videos, where the medium opens up a space to think of and visualize imaginative forces of agency, to make the invisible visible (suffering, dedication, devotion, etc.). Video technology's potential to make visible the invisible was thus reversed in the domain of actuality: the visible (kar sevak as underdog) became invisible. Fulfilling the dreams of the ancestors: the 'serene' martyr Getting rid of the ghosts of the past While the videos discussed so far have relied on the image of the 'underdog' martyr to evoke and transform feelings of passivity and victimization into active resistance in what is described as a justified battle against the 'pseudo-secular' government, the following video example of 1997 celebrating and commemorating fifty years of Indian Independence from a Hindutva prospective, introduces a different role model for 'dynamic devotion'. Here, the heroic martyr came to be employed solely as a distant 'wish-image' on MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 271 which to contemplate, a commodified fetish for 'mundane' desires stripped of any notion of selfless (head-)sacrifice. One reason for this is that the BJP did not intend to present the Indian people and itself as standing with the back to the wall, but wanted instead to celebrate Indian culture and history. In this context, the gloomy martyrdom in the gutters of Ayodhya metamorphosed into a festive 'pop-martyrdom'. With the demolition of the Babri mosque on 6 December 1992, the army of martyrs invoked in the figure of the kar sevak vanished like a ghost from a bottle. Even the Ayodhya videos were either removed from the shelves of shops selling Hindutva paraphernalia or collected thick layers of dust. Yet, in many of the interviews with members of the VHP or RSS in Delhi it became

evident that the footage of the killings documented in the videos was still alive in their memories. But the perspective on both events and the site itself had changed. Most of the informants stated that the communal violence that had accompanied the Ayodhya controversy had negative effects, especially on the international reputation of the BJP Within the Sangh Parivar, opinions about the violent excesses and their representation diverged. VHP-supporters tended to blame the BJP for the violent outbursts, stating that peace would have possibly prevailed had the agitation preserved a predominantly religious focus. They criticized the BJP for having abused the Ayodhya controversy for election purposes. Likewise, members of the BJP blamed the kar sevaks, reducing them to a fanatic mob of uncontrolled angry young men. The dispute on the degree of BJP leaders' involvement in and thus responsibility for the orchestration of the demolition is still ongoing. The 'B-grade', or 'underdog' martyrs have meanwhile been replaced by superior figures, 'serene' heroic martyrs that have come to enjoy wide public acknowledgement, particularly as regards their involvement in the Freedom Struggle. Many of their lives have already been portrayed in the various media of popular culture (comics, TV-software, commercial movies etc.). In the postAyodhya context, mobilization came to be associated with the act of sacrificing oneself for a life-time by incorporating ideal modes of conduct in one's habitus, rather than giving up life as such. 'On sale' for personal identification was a whole set of 'clean' heroic martyrs. A spokesperson from the BJB media cell in the party's New Delhi headquarters commented, when asked about the difference between the martyrs of the Ayodhya movement and those of the post-Ayodhya BJP particularly those employed in the Swamajayanti Rath Yatra, a nation-wide event staged in 1997: 'There can be no sane comparison between the martyrs of the freedom struggle and those who died in the Ayodhya movement'.103 Inherent in this quote, read in the context of the previous analysis of We Can Give Up Our Uves... is the idea that hierarchies of martyrdom

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are flexible. It seems as if the 'underdog' was good enough for mobilization in times of crisis. However, he seems to have lacked 'sophistication' in terms of a symbolic glorification of Indian straggle against colonialism, on an ephemeral rather than action-oriented basis. The most recent political video called Swarna Jayanti Rath YatraA Documentary Film on Lai Krishna Advani's Patriotic Pilgrimage commissioned by the BJP in 1997104 was just such a piece of education and glorification of Indian heroism. Addressing party workers and potential sympathizers, the video aimed at telling its viewers what the individual responsibilities and

duties of an Indian citizen were: preserving and enhancing national identity by following and promoting the dharmic principles of Hindutva. In this political 'national-devotion pilgrimage' (deshbhakti h teerth yatra) conducted throughout India by the then BJP party president L K Advani, from May to July 1997, the ideal citizen's identity was now anchored by means of appealing to a series of carefully selected martyrs and heroes of Indian history, especially from the period of anti-colonial struggle. The concept of Indianness had come to be based upon the commemoration of the alleged ideals and dreams of the martyrs, the sanctification of land through their deeds and deaths and the future concept of building a 'temple of the nation' (rashtra mandir) to be individually internalized. An appeal to the image of the devotee opening his chest to reveal his innermost beliefs rather than to head-sacrifice. The selection of martyrs for this new pantheon was based on the slogan of 'unity in diversity'. Footage shows that portraits of Bhagat Singh and his comrade Chandrashekar Azad next to Veer Savarkar and RSS-leader K B Hedgewar, and Muslim martyr Ashfaqullah Khan next to martyr Veerapandya Kattabomman from Tamil Nadu in South India were mounted on Advani's chariot. A portrait of Mohandas K Gandhi, representing the 'moderates' in the freedom movement, was put right next to a portrait of 'extremist' Lokamanya Tilak (Figure 89). One large hoarding was attached to the back of the rath: a picture of Bharat Mata, the only woman in this assembly. In 'real life' these men would have probably fought, or at least argued, against this eclectic projection of cultural nationalism as 'unity in diversity'. Yet, in this context, they are all part and parcel of the same fraternity. The accompanying text to the video stated that the yatra itself, as well as the video, had a noble cause. It is: 'a journey that reminds the ;yatri (pilgrim) of the nation's continuing civilizational journey. This ritual is one of the key elements that ensured the survival of Indian civilization, helping it to preserve its continuity in time and its capacity to weave unity in all its seemingly maddening diversity'.105 There were noticeable stylistic changes in this video too. There was no longer an involvement with special effects and miracle scenes as with the figure 89 Swarna Jayanti Rath Yatra, panels of martyrs. Press photograph from the BJP Headquarters in New Delhi. 1997, story of Lord Rama's epiphany. A new space had been entered in which a variety of stories could be told about the respective lives of the chosen martyrs and heroes. Watching the video is almost like walking through a theme park or a tourist package tour, the 'video ;yatri' can pick and choose according to his or her likings, go 'Ah!That's the Andamans, where Veer Savarkar was imprisoned!', or 'Look! Mahatma Gandhi's Ashram!' The tactics of name-, site- and image-dropping seem to have replaced narratives of the kind we encountered in montage or special effects, the god posters, and docu-drama scenes of Jain Studios videos. This linear diary of the yatra has only one song about the patriotism of the party conveying the need of every citizen to tune into the mantra of individual responsibility towards the national community. Even the song is not related to the format of bhajans but is composed like a march. The chorus has a faster, 'modern' rhythm, one that appeals to the viewer to join in with this convoy of triumph and glory. This is an exhibition of the glory of Indianness, India's history, her dams, her cultural traditions, the sea, the mountains. In sum, everything has become an integral part of a country made up of patriotic people willing to sacrifice their life for the motherland. The video does not want to be the bridge to or messenger of a battlefield but to open the doors to a colourful museum of national pride and

honour. The bloodstains of the 'underdog' martyr have faded. Now it is a serene and noble martyr who carries a halo of historical grandeur. The BJP presents itself as a party with a 'clean shirt', with nothing to hide. The 'underdog martyr' fell victim to those politics of self-censorship.

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How was the 'new' and shining martyr contested, and what was contested through him? By holding that India was once again falling into the trap of another form of invasion, that is, alleged cultural degeneration and onslaught from the West, images of the fight for independence came to be presented through the portrayal of freedom fighters as ideal patriots. India should be strong, confident and independent on the basis of her economic and cultural sovereignty, as well as native concepts of governance. Appealing to the visions of those men embraced by the cult of the death, L K Advani asks: Why have their dreams of New India remained unfulfilled even after 50 years of freedom? What would the patriots and martyrs of the freedom struggle think if they were to see India of today, her polity steeped in corruption and her society reeling under poverty and social disharmony?1 Instead of promoting itself as a party of the Hindu majority, the BJP has now chosen to broaden its rhetoric and appeal to a wider audience. By turning itself into a speaker of an India that could be great and confident but is caught up in corruption scandals, ethnic violence and economic underdevelopment, the party suggests to have stepped out of the shade of communal politics. We now encounter a multi-faceted Arcadian India, one of enlightened freedom fighters, usually already familiar figures within school curricula, ready-made for consumption on posters to be found in every party office or other public building. The new 'A-grade' heroes are assembled in an eclectic style, no matter whether they were Socialists, Anarchists, Marxists or supporters of the muchcriticized Gandhian version of ahimsa. I asked Rohit M (RM) about this arbitrariness of references to heroes that seems to me both the essence and irony of the BJP-slogan 'unity in diversity': CB: What does it implythat the BJP just wants to whitewash the people and their biographies and try to incorporate them into their kind of notion of cultural identity? What happened? Or does it mean that they've actually become 'Leftists', or that they promote Socialism? RM: Socialist or non-Socialist, I don't think this matters. Once you are in the process of changing that identity question, this is what I say, the day the Leftists or the Congress people will go for the kar seva, this question is going to change. That day it's going to happen. Even though 'that day' has yet not arrived, the notion of martyrdom in the late 1990s had changed its frame of reference. Being so close to state power, the BJP required a different profile for agitation. Therefore, it adopted nationally recognized figures who, whether or not they had actively promoted and engaged

in violence, could be associated with heroic resistance to colonization. This MOTHER INDIAS HEROIC SONS 275 threat was not only coming from outside the geographical boundaries of India. It was also situated further in the past than the Ayodhya controversy and was univocally opposed by all segments of Indian society. This example shows too that there is no fixed definition of martyrdom. Rather, the strength of the model lies in its flexibility, to make and unmake martyrs according to context and intention within a specific discourse of power. Happy endings for heroic martyrs? Like Bharat Mata, the Hindutva martyr, as he was displayed in the videos, is an imaginary rather than a real figure, a model to think, perform and define borders with. He dwells in a sphere where concepts of tradition and modernity, religion and politics are constantly transgressed and negotiated along inclusive and exclusive categories such as inside and outside, legitimate and illegitimate, tolerant and aggressive. Through the martyr, Hindutva spokespeople sought to leverage ideas of displacement and imaginary homelands, imprisonment and resistance of the Hindu people. With the idea of suffering and crisis located around and within him, he was turned into a hero who was said never to surrender, even at the cost of his own life. On the contrary, the martyr was to even overcome and transform the suffering of the group he represented and had emerged from. Not only did the figure of the martyr function as a 'wishimage'. He was also attributed with the role of a witness to as well as participant in Hindutva's battle between truth and injustice, fighting and, if needed, dying for the welfare of society/the nation. Thus, he could become a bearer of truth and of better times to come. The notion of martyrdom came to be central to the rhetoric of Hindutva ideology and political presentation, in that the martyr could be employed as a fetish of nation building, especially as regards crisis-constitution. Dressed up and staged by Hindutva ideologues as 'protagonist' within narratives of Hindu victimization and agitation, the martyr was a mixture of saint and politician as well as mythical warrior. It is important to point out here that martyr and victim have never been clearly distinguished as different categories per se. Rather, the borders between them oscillate.108 A martyr's role would be less efficient could he not be presented as a fearless hero, a pioneer or revolutionary, and could his example not be employed to link 'reality' and 'utopia', past and present, history and myth. On the basis of his legendary appeal, the martyr was often woven into a dense net of popular stories turning him into a charismatic mystic, a prophet or messiah-like figure surrounded by miracles and spectacle. In the 'Hindutva martyr', various concepts of self-sacrifice are fused, ranging from an appropriation of the martial hero (Sikhism) to the non-violent satyagrahi. By means of establishing a cult of martyrdom, Hindutva

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276 EMPOWERING VISIONS representatives attempted to reshape history, address conflicts of the present, and project models of agency, norms and values, for a 'better' future. Martyrdom and violence are closely intertwined, for violence against an alleged threat can thus be sanctified, and legitimised. The martyr, representing the utmost realisation of self-sacrifice for a particular cause, is an essential element within Hindutva rhetoric. This also became evident in the course of this Chapter, when the shifting frames for the production and interpretation of martyrdom were addressed as they respond to a change in the political landscape. Are the times of holy wars over? The late 1990s witnessed issue-less national politics, unstable governments and coalitions and a politically fragmented landscape due to increasing regionalization. Most of all, it seems that particularly due to the Ayodhya controversy and the violence linked to it, many Indians have lost their confidence in both the religious as well as the political leaders of pan-Indian status. At a time when a party such as the BJP aims at appealing to all segments of society, a cult of 'underdog' martyrs, associated with communal violence and conflict between people and government, seems unable to translate stability and harmony. Furthermore, this cult had addressed only a small portion of Hindu people for the purpose of brief and action-loaded mobilization in order to increase feelings of utmost crisis. They were, to recall Rohit M's comment on the 25 per cent of men in the 'offensive mood', the fear sevaks allegedly pushed into a 'backs-againstthe-wair situation. However, alongside great heroic martyrs, Mother India still seems to demand sacrifices from her 'ordinary' sons for the sake of her freedom and honour. This finds reflection in a statement by a BJP media expert: 'If the need arises, genuine patriots will certainly be called upon to lay down their lives for the nation'. In April 1998, the BJP formed a coalition government. Shortly after, it was at the brink of a war with Pakistan over the matter of Kashmir. Once again, the idea of heroic civic martyrdom came to pave the way for the parliamentary elections of autumn 1999. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's speech on Independence Day 1999 was spiked with the rhetoric of martyrdom for the nation's welfare, thanking those soldiers who had bravely given their lives in the war, consoling and blessing their families, and appealing to the Indian people to further support those men who became the new 'heroes of the nation'. Camouflaged as a contemplative reflection on the century, but actually an ode to battles and martyrdom, Vajpayee's statement read: As we stand at the sunset of the twentieth century and look back at the events of the era that has passed, we see the end of colonialism from

Indian soil to be the most important development. Our great leaders, and many generations of our countrymen, waged a powerful struggle for independence. By doing so, they paved the way for the independence of MOTHER INDIA'S HEROIC SONS 277 other countries, too. We pay homage to those self-sacrificing and devoted leaders and patriots who struggled for freedom throughout their lives, and, when necessary, even laid down their lives as aahuti (offering) in the great yagya (sacrifice) of freedom. Whether the 'martyrs of Kashmir' are 'A-' or 'B-grade' martyrs remains to be seen. What seems important in this case is that heroic civic martyrdom has become a 'classical' device in the context of a nationalist rhetoric of freedom and sovereignty. The idea serves as a handy tool for ideologues and pragmatists alike to project models of action and to temporarily assemble and constitute a community. This in turn requires a credible and emotive narrative based on metaphors of familial loyalty, martial masculinity and sacred violence versus ongoing battles and oppression by external and internal threats to freedom. It remains to be seen if and when Mother India's forgotten sons will be called upon again. The props and script may then have changed. But the rhetoric of heroic Martyrdom, battle and satisfied revenge may will be drawn upon again.

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318
85 86 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

NOTES mosque fell at 14-45, the second one at 16.30 and the third dome collapsed at 16.45. Only at 16.50 did the leaders appeal to the people to maintain peace . .. (Chande 1992: 70). The role of spokespeople is controversial: Other sources state that the leaders appeared at 11.00 (among them L K Advani and A B Vajpayee (BJP); K C Sudarshan and H V Seshadri (RSS) ; Ashok Singhal and Vinay Katidar (VHP)), left the scene at 11.45 - the demolition started shortly afterwards, at noon (Nandy et al 1995: 192). See also Jaffrelot 1996: 455. Jaffrelot 1996: 458-464.

Personal interview, March 1997. Nandy et al. 1995: 8; 16-17; Shah 1998: 248-249. Nandy tal 1995: vi. Homi Bhabha (1994), Sunil Khilnani (1997) and Arjun Appadurai (1997, 1996). According to Brass, a 'fire-tender' may even manage to 'masquerade as promoter of communal peace and harmony' (Brass 1997: 17). Brass 1997: 46-47. Ibid.: 16. Personal interview, March 1997. March 1997. Rajya Sabha 1990-1991, here: 3.1.1991, emphasis mine. The following quotes by Jain have been taken from the same source. Page-numbers are kept in the text body. Personal interview, February 1997. Dening 1996: 38. Personal interview, February 1997. Personal interview, February 1997. Personal interview, October 1998. Personal interview, October 1998. Personal interview, February 1997. Nandy et al 1995: 37. Personal interview, October 1998. The nuclear missile tests incorporated two symbolically loaded narratives: the heavily contested region of Kashmir and the fragile relationship with Pakistan, as well as the scientific aspects involved in the launching of missiles. The figure of the soldiers fighting along India's borders as well as the scientist, are important in national rhetoric since India's independence, but increasingly so towards the late 1990s. Another figure of pride is the computer programmer, representing the worldwide recognition of India's software capital. Personal interview, February 1997. Personal interview, February 1997. Personal interview, October 1998. Chapter - 6 Mother India's Heroic Sons: a passion play of martyrdom 1 Dubashi 1995: 5. Jay Dubashi is an RSS activist and frequently writes for the Organiser. 2 Translation from a devotional song in The Truth Shall Not Be Touched (1992). 3 See Davis 1996: 29. Davis mentions 200,000 kar sevaks (ibid.), Jaffrelot refers to NOTES 319 c. 150,000 people who were put in detention before 30 October (Jaffrelot 1996: 419-20). Jaffrelot 1996: 418. Ibid.: 421. Paramilitary forces were made up of Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Border Security Force and Cultural Reserve Police Force (Dasgupta n.d.: 103; see also Rajagopal 2001: 197). Again, estimated numbers of actual deaths vary. Sangh Parivar spokespeople claimed

the loss of a few hundred kar sevaks, the government announced much less. Jaffrelot mentions 18 persons killed on 30 October 1990 (1996: 422); Rajagopal gives the number of five (2001: 197), while Datta refers to 20 claimed dead by the police while the VHP talked of thousands (1993: 62). On the martyrs of Ayodhya in 1990, see Datta 1993: 61-63; Jaffrelot 1996: 420-425; Rajagopal 2001: 182-3, 215. Of the video We Can Give Up Our Lives... more than 100,000 copies were sold through BJP offices and branches, as well as in RSS and VHP shops (Jaffrelot 1996: 422) and many more must have been copied en route. Personal interview, December 1996. This heading is in reference to Anand Patwardhan's documentary film entitled Father, Son and Holy War (1994) where Patwardhan investigates the relation between male chauvinism and religio-political extremism. This term is also used as the synonym for national salvation, for example by Veer Savarkar, author of Hindutva. Who is a Hindu? (1923), a crucial work evolving the notion of militant Hinduism. More discussion is required with respect to the comparison of Islamic terminology. There seems to be a parallel, if not an identification of dharma yuddha with the notion of al- cihd assagir, the little jihad where weapons can be employed, in addition to alchihd al-kabir, the great jihad, every individual's spiritual and intellectual effort to peacefully promote and follow the principles of the Qu'ran. Yet, jihad does not promote or sanctify killing and forced conversion per se. Violence is only justified when acted out in defence against tyranny, injustice and violence. It had been introduced to India through Sufism at a time when spiritual and military warriors spread their versions of Islam, paralleling the arrival and establishment of Mughal Empires in the 16th century. The Islamic concept of the shaheed (martyr) has been adapted into Hindu nationalist discourse, as well as Sikh devotional traditions and martial ethics (see Fenech 2000; Nijhawan 2002). Further scholarly attention in this context is needed with regard to the term mujaheddin (holy warrior) that could be used both on the transcendent level of fighting for purity and truth as well as against an actual enemy. For example, Carl Ernst has distinguished two kinds of Islamic martyrs: The warrior-saint in battle (ghazi) and the mystical martyr finding salvation from earthly live in death and torture (hallaj) (Ernst 1985: 313; 1993; see also Rizvi 1997). Voiceover commentary, God Manifests Himself. Ibid. Ibid. In the popular readings of the Ramayana, Ravan is the ruler of Lanka, a demon. There are various interpretations and dramatizations of his role, but generally he is seen and understood as evil antagonist to Lord Ram (see Richman 1994; ThielHorstmann 1991.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

NOTES Sarkar 1996: 181. Ibid.: 173, 175. Pinch 1996: 140. Ibid.: 145. On warrior saints, see also van der Veer 1989; Michaels 1998: 301-3; Ernst 1985; Eickelman and Piscatori 1997: 63-68. Pinch 1996: 147. The most popular heroic kings in Hindutva rhetoric are Rana Pratap and Shivaji, both fighting Mughal armies in pre-colonial India. GMH has a scene featuring a warrior-queen referred to as 'Rajkumari', well-known for her association with 'wargoddess' Durga (voiceover commentary). Seejuergensmeyer 1994. See Chapter 2; Biardeau 1997: 114-116. Arthava Veda 12-1-62. K C Sudarshan, senior RSS leader at the time of the interview (February 1997), Sudarshan was Joint General Secretary of the RSS. Today, he is supreme guide of the RSS (sarsanghchalak). McKean 1996b. In an audiocassette used for mass mobilization regarding the Ayodhya issue, renouncer Sadhvi Rithambhara appealed to women: 'You have to make yourself into motherhood: remember how Bhagat Singh's [a Socialist revolutionary who was hanged by the British in 1931] mother was found crying after his death, not because she had lost her son, but because she had no other son to be martyred' (Sarkar 1995: 193). Bhagat Singh was an atheist and socialist, and has been, and is still today, one of the key national martyrs in India. Bhagat Singh and his comrade Rajguru Dutt's prison statement of 1929 reveals their search for 'global' as well as 'local' models of resistance by basing their idea of Indian revolution on the writings of Guru Gobind Singh, Shivaji, Kamal Pasha and Riza Khan; on Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin; the French and the Russian Revolution and the Irish freedom movement (Khullar 1981: 120). For further references, see Grover 1987, Gupta 1977, Mohan 1985, Noorani 1996. Personal interview, April 1997. Talreja 1982: 234. See Nandy 1988: 7. Talreja 1982: 6-7. Hage 1996. (Inreference to Lacan). Sarkar 1996: 182. Najmabadi 1997: 445. Ibid.: 451.

Ibid.: 459. See Chatterjee 1995a. See Ramaswamy 2002b, 2001. Pinney has pointed out that British colonialists were particularly cautious of popular prints depicting Kali due to her associations with the anti-colonial struggle in Bengal (Pinney, in Bayly 1990:341). Ramaswamy 2002b. 152. Guha-Thakurta has noted that journals like Prabasi attempted to challenge the 'calumny of cowardice and physical weakness that the British heaped on the Bengalis' (Guha-Thakurta 1992: 137). NOTES
43 44

45 46 47 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 66 67 68 69 70 71

321
The term 'geobody' derives from Winichahul's study on Siam (1994). See also Ramaswamy 2002b: 152. Golwalkar 1996: 93. Ghose 1997: 16. In another version, there referred to as the poem Bhavani Mandir (1905), the quote continues: 'Does he quietly sit down to his meal... or rush to her rescue?' (cited in Nandy 1988: 92). Najmabadi 1997: 443. All excerpts are from Bharati 1995: 9. Ramaswamy 1999: 18. Bharati 1950: 7. The wordings of the RSS prayer, put on the Internet (www.rss.org), use the same strategy of creating bonding and feelings of obligation: 'Grant us such might as no power on earth can ever challenge, such purity of character as would command the respect of the whole world...' Ramaswamy 2002b. Atharva Veda 12-1-62, cited in Talreja 1982: 238-239. Talreja 1982: 234. Golwalkar 1996: 92. Ibid.: 95. Ibid.: 448, emphasis mine. Ernst 1985: 308. Personal interview, October 1998.

Kazmi 1996. Chakravarty 1993: 260-8. Personal interview, April 1998. Personal interview, November 1996. Fenech notes that around 1900, Indologists reinterpreted the idea of martyrdom from 'elements such as the asceticism or renunciation (tyaaga or samnyaasa) ' (2000: 5) On devotionalism and heroism in Hindu religious practice and thought, see Michaels 1998: 281-303. 'Riitlischwur, see Flacke 1988. See Mohandas K Gandhi: Satyagraha: Transforming Unjust Relationships Through the Power of the Soul, reprinted in Hay 1991: 265-270. This idea also shows parallels to the Islamic concept of jihad in which followers are conceived as seekers of the sincere path. See endnote 11, this chapter. Personal conference notes from Martyrdom religious/political: The Rhetoric of Fundamentalism in the Age of Globalization, Europe-University Viadrina, Frankfurt/ Oder, 5-7 November 1998. Personal interview, April 1998. Wood 1993: xv-xvii. See Fenech 2000: 8 pp. Ibid.: 6-7. Ibid. 3-4. Excerpt from a public speech (Hindi) presented by a VHP saint in Ayodhya as it is in GMH. Narrated by Plato in the Symposium 213: 15, cited in Gell 1998: 341.

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74 75 76 77

IIIIIIIIIIIUIIIIIIIII
NOTES Camille, in The Gothic Idol, 1989: 230-1, cited in Gell 1998: 347. Thanks to Christopher Pinney for his reference to this aspect of Cell's work. My gratitude also goes to Paul Taylor, The Warburg Institute, University of London, for the reference on martyrs, such as Gertrude of Helfta and Ignatuis of Antioch. One of the earliest depictions known of Hanuman opening his chest seems to be a Kalighat painting, Calcutta, c. 1835 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London; thanks to Divia Patel for enabling me to view some of the material in the India Collection of the museum). According to Carl Ernst, expert on the history of Islamic martyrdom, there are no references to similar subjects visualized in Pahari paintings, and no such references in Islamic art, for example, in Sufi iconography (Ernst, quoted from personal email conversation of August 1998). Gell 1998: 129. Ibid.: 131. Pinney 1997.

See endnote 27. See Guha-Thakurta 1992; Mitter 1994. Taussig 1993: 24. Singh 1983, n.p. Personal interview, October 1998. The India Office Library and Records at the British Library in London holds several popular prints with this iconography on microfiche. Most of them were proscribed during the time of British India. 'Bhagat's curious present' shows Bhagat Singh presenting his bleeding head on a plate (by Sivasankar Tirani, Kanpur c. 1931, OR MIC 505), but there is also, referring back to the 'Sacred Heart' iconography discussed above, a print 'The love in the heart of Mr. B.K. Dutta', where Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Bismil(?) are revealed in Dutta's open chest (c. 1931, OR MIC 884; for more on related iconography of popular prints, see OR MIC 773; 901, and 1035). Nationalist devotion banks on models of spiritual and religious sacrifice, as in the following verse from Guru Nanak's Adi Granth: 'If you want to play the game of love approach me with your head on the palm of your head. Place your feet on this path and give your head without regard to the opinion of others' (cited in Fenech 2000: 98, see also fn. 203 ibid.). In the first half of the twentieth century, there are posters such as Heroes Sacrifice (c. 1931-2, printed at Janki Printing House and published by Krishna Picture House, Lahore) on which the parents of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev donate their son's heads to Bharat Mata (in fact, they were not decapitated but hanged, and cremated at a riverside, near Huseiniwala) ; there are some in which Subhas Chandra Bose (legendary leader of the Indian National Army) clad in a uniform, kneels down amidst various other heads of freedom fighters, to present his (smiling) head on a plate to Bharat Mata (Jai hind, 'Victory to India', drawn into the skies). On Deep Singh, see Fenech 2000: 95; on Sikh martyrdom, see also Banerjee 1976, Singh 1975, Singh 1979, Uberoi 1996. An iconographie link from the head sacrifice to mythological battles and the cult of the goddess is given in Hiltebeitel's study of the cult of Draupadi: an illustration displays a fresco in a Draupadi temple in Chennai (Madras) on which Arjun's son Aravan offers his head to Kali (Hiltebeitel 1988, Volume 1: 249, 328), an iconography very like the 1930s poster depicting shahids such as Bhagat Singh presenting their heads to Mother India. However, as Hiltebeitel points out, the Sanskrit Mahabharata knows nothing
90
91 92 93 94 95 96 97 100 101 102 103 104

NOTES 323 of the sacrifice in the battle of Kurukshetra that plays an important role in Tamil versions of the epic (ibid.: chapter 15): 'the story in its Tamil forms is clearly related to a traditional South Indian glorification and apparent practice of heroic self-

mutilation - in some cases suggesting self-decapitation - before the goddess, usually for the sake of victory in battle' (ibid.: 318). Head sacrifice is also linked to idea of death and resurrection in Hindu ritual (ibid.: 366). How and when this narrative could have entered the Hindutva rhetoric, possibly through concepts of nationalism (see Ramaswamy 1999), requires more research. Furthermore, Kathleen Erndl mentions a form of head sacrifice in the context of Vaishno Devi, a popular mother goddess in Jammu, North India (also identified with Durga) who receives the head of her bodyguard Bhairo as a symbol of his utmost selfless devotion to her (Erndl 1990: 241-247). In his doctoral thesis, Nijhawan suggests that in the colonial period, this discourse was further heightened by tying martyrdom and the struggle for the liberation of Sikh sacred sites to notions of territoriality (2002: 195). Das 1995b: 155. The Times of India, 20 November 1990, cited in Aggarwal and Chowdhry 1991: 58. Ernst 1985: 308. The Mandai Report recommended a reservation of 27 per cent of posts in central administration and public coporations be reserved for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) who constitute about 52 per cent of the Indian population. See Jaffrelot 1996: 414; 430; 443; Malik and Yadav 1995. Rohit M, personal interview, April 1998. White has noted that many cults of martyrdom can be established quickly, and do not require the authority of a religious institution, as is often the case in European Catholicism. Thus, some cults take only a decade to establish, as for example, in the case of the Easter Rising in Ireland (White, in Wood 1993: 386). Likewise, they may also last for just a brief period. BJP 1990. Michaels 1998: 149-162, 299-300; 2004: 132-147, 272-273. See Michaels 1998: 162; 2004: 146-147. Frontiine 24.11.-7.12.1990, cited in Aggarwal and Chowdry 1991: 61. Jaffrelot 1996: 102-103, 422; also Datta 1993: 51. Protocol notes, January 1997. Cited in Prasad 1996: 142. See http://www.vhp.org/vhp_bharat/dedication.html. For further references on martyrologies influenced by Islamic thought and practice, see Ernst 1985; Massignon 1982; Saxer 1984; Schwerin 1984; Wood 1993. See Ernst 1985; Domseiff: n.d., n.p. Taussig 1987: 121. Taussig considered the role of the sacred, magic and violence in relation to reason in the modern secular state (Taussig 1992: 111-140; 1997). Tanking 1987. Personal email conversation of August 1998. ANI News Reports, 55 minutes, English and Hindi; complemented by a booklet, see Kulkarni 1997. Kulkarni 1997: 8.

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324 NOTES 106 Ibid.: 91. 107 Personal interview, October 1998. 108 Wood 1993: xv-xvii. 109 Email conversation, August 1998. 110 Excerpt from the press release. Epilogue Kulkarni 1993. Sudheendra Kulkarni, personal interview, February 1998. Vajpayee 2001. This does not mean that Jain Studios as such has been sidelined. For its television channel, the studios' website claims to reach 18 million homes (see www.jaintv.com/ jain_studio.htm). See also Butcher 2003. However, the 'Information Task Force', a special group within the government, is committed to the introduction of computerized facilities in agriculture in order to decentralize information and knowledge transfer. 'Let's make India an internet superpower', Press release, BJP January 12, 1998. Vajpayee 2001. See Castells 1997, chapter 2. One example is the incorporation of about 2,000 RSS-controlled schools in the state of Uttar Pradesh (Vanaik 2001). On the agenda was also the attempt to gain control over text books for schools as well as the publication of books on Indian history. See Brosius 2004. Several incidents point towards a crisis of governance and enormous pressure on the Prime Minister, for example his support of the Election Commission's ban of a VHP procession during the campaign for Assembly Elections in Gujarat in November 2002. The yatra, named Hindupath Padshahi (Procession of Hindu Sovereignty) was to start in Godhra and end at the Akshardham temple, on the tenth anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition (see Menon 2002). Venkatesan 2002. Noorani 2002. Muralidharan 2002, Noorani 2002. Pradhan 2002. Rastogi 2002. There is also an indication that issues and events do not always 'work' according to their organizer's expectations. There was a disappointing turnout of supporters during the run-up to the announced reconstruction ceremony in March 2002 as well as the VHP-sponsored Poomakooti Mahayagna that was meant to ratchet up emotions for the Ram temple. The VHP had announced 10,000 people but the actual turnout was 500 (Indian Express, 2.6.2002). Schiffauer2000,p.321.

Aijaz Ahmad reports that according to a poll survey, 91 per cent of urban Indians supported the nuclear tests (Ahmad 1998). See Bunsha 2002a. The Forensic Science Laboratory issued a report on their findings with respect to the burning of the Sabarmati Express, rejecting claims that the
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

NOTES 325 wagons had been set afire by agents from outside (ibid.). Hameed 2002, Setalvad 2002. Kaur2003, p. 119. Rao 2002. The BJP won 126 seats of 181, with an especially strong support basis in riotaffected constituencies (Yadav 2003). One of the major dilemmas in these elections seems to have been the realization among opposition parties that they could not offer - or did not want to engage in elaborating - an alternative agenda to Hindutva cultural nationalism. Instead, they are affected by what could be termed as a 'mild saffronization' of politics outside the domain of the Sangh Parivar. Mahurkar 2002, p. 23. Bunsha 2002c. Bunsha 2002b. The producers of the website are listed as Advisors', 'Lieutenants' and 'Honorary Members'. They work from 'Bharat' (India), the USA and Kuwait (see www.hinduunity.org/branches.html). See Brosius 2004. The introductory text reads: 'THIS PAGE EXPOSES THE EVIL FORCES THAT ARE AGAINST THE MOVEMENT OF HINDUTVA. EACH OF THESE PERSONS AND OR ORGANIZATION HAVE BEEN FOUND GUILTY OF LEADING EFFORTS AGAINST OUR MOVEMENT THROUGH THEIR ACTION OR OTHERWISE: THEIR CRIMES ARE CRIMES AGAINST THE HINDU PEOPLE.' Listed are names of Pakistans General Pervez Musharraf, the Pope, Osama bin Laden, Sonia Gandhi and many others. The netizen is asked to file his or her 'Criminal's Name' on a form, adding 'a brief description of Anti-Hindu Activity carried out by this criminal' (see http://www.hinduunity.org/hitlist.html). See http://www.geocities.com/jairamal/hinduposter.gifand http://www.geocities.com/ jairamal/missionkashmirposter.jpg. Mission Kashmir is a film by Vinod Chopra, released in the year 2000, starring film stars Hrithik Roshan and Sanjay Dutt. The original film poster has been used for a montage whereby the two heroes are turned into Hindu warriors.

Journal Article Excerpt

The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800.

by Jay M. Smith By David A. Bell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv plus 304 pp.). David A. Bell's elegantly written and handsomely produced book offers many new insights into the origins of modern French nationalism. Perhaps the most important insight involves the chronology of the analysis itself, for Bell establishes beyond doubt that patriotic sensibilities and the desire to build a cohesive nation predated the French Revolution by at least forty years. In fact, as Bell shows, attention to the patrie and its needs increased in intensity already in the last decades of Louis XIV's reign. The author traces the growing importance of the ideas of nation and pattie in published literature of the eighteenth century with such thoroughness and care that The Cult of the Nation must count as one of the most widely researched books to have appeared in the field over the last ten years. Few references to the nation and the patrie escaped the author's notice, it seems, and specialists of the eighteenth century, and historians of nationalism more generally, will benefit from Bell's meticulous research for years to come. Nevertheless, Bell's considerable evidence attesting the efflorescence of patriotic and nationalist ideas is attached to an overarching thesis that, to say the least, will prove controversial. Drawing from the work of Marcel Gauchet, Bell constructs an elaborate hypothesis concerning the "disenchantment" of the European world in the later seventeenth century. By this process of disenchantment, the people of France (by which Bell really means the educated elites who reasonably form the focus of the book's investigation) came to regard God as "absent from the sphere of human affairs." This separation of the worldly realm from the realm of the divine inspired the assumption that the "ordering principles" of worldly institutions had to be the product of human creation (p. 199). The operation of human affairs, it was now assumed, obeyed no transcendent logic that ordered the cosmos and represented the mind of God for all to see. Consequently, the nation came to be seen as an object requiring the determined attention, and the shaping intentions, of the political community that it encompassed. Nationalism, as distinct from mere national sentiment, grew out of this new will to construct and shape the political community. This argument is plausible, as far as it goes, but Bell does little to distinguish the phenomenon of disenchantment either from the appearance of a newly secular historical consciousness in the Renaissance or from the affirmation of "everyday life" that proved to be one of the important and widespread consequences of the Reformation. (1) The lack of conceptual precision is important, because Bell specifically dates the emergence of the new national ideas to the "decades around 1700" (p. 15). Even if one concedes the reality and importance of the long-term process of disenchantment, the timing of this "patriotic" turn still requires explanation. Bell alludes to changes in material culture that bespoke the appearance of a Habermasian public sphere, but he curiously rejects any political explanation for the change in sensibilities at the end of the seventeenth century. He does this even though "the decades around 1700" were a time of growing dissatisfaction with Louis XIV's absolutist style, and even though the king was criticized specifically for placing his own pursuit of gloire above the interests of the patrie and nation. (2) He snidely dismisses the evidence and arguments for a pivotal aristocratic resistance to absolutism, for example, partly on grounds that the aristocrats did not "treat the nation as a political artifact in need of construction, as the French revolutionaries would later do"

(p. 25). Leaving aside the issue of the accuracy of that claim, Bell's reasons for discounting aristocratic and other "political" opposition to absolutism around 1700 betray a teleological impulse that influences his reading of the evidence in unfortunate ways. Bell notes, for example, that widespread use of the terms patrie and nation really only occurred after about 1750, when conflicts between the king and the parlements focused attention on the adversaries' respective constitutional roles and their representative functions. Despite the timing of those conflicts, however, the political arguments developed by the former parlementaire Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, receive scant attention. In fact, Bell conspicuously bypasses the widely read and obsessively discussed Montesquieu and selects as his mid-century textual turning point a forgettable book on the character of nations written in 1743 by ...

Maximilien Robespierre: Republic of Virtue (1794)

In his speech of February 5, 1794. Robespierre provided a comprehensive statement of his political theory, in which he equated democracy with virtue and justified the use of terror in defending democracy. What is the objective toward which we are reaching, The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality. the reign of that eternal justice whose laws are engraved not on marble or stone but in the hearts of all men, even in the heart of the slave who has forgotten them or of the tyrant who disowns them. . We wish an order of things where all the low and cruel passions will be curbed, all the beneficent and generous Passions awakened by the laws. where ambition will be a desire to deserve glory and serve the patrie [nation], where distinctions grow only out of the very system of equality; where the citizen will be subject to the authority of the magistrate, the magistrate to that of the people, and the People to that of justice; where the patrie assures the well-being of each individual, and where each individual shares with pride the prosperity and glory of the patrie, where every soul expands by the continual communication of republican sentiments, and by the need to merit the esteem of a great people, where the arts will embellish the liberty that ennobles them, and commerce will be the source of public wealth and not merely of the monstrous riches of a few families. We wish to substitute in our country ... all the virtues and miracles of the republic for all the vices and absurdities of the monarchy. We wish, in a word, to fulfill the intentions of nature and the destiny of humanity, realize the promises of philosophy, and acquit providence of the long reign of crime and tyranny. We wish that France, once illustrious among enslaved nations, may, while eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that ever existed, become a model to nations, a terror to oppressors, a consolation to the oppressed, an ornament of the universe; and that, by

sealing our work with our blood, we may witness at least the dawn of universal happinessthis is our ambition, this is our aim. What kind of government can realize these prodigies [great deeds)? A democratic or republican government only.... A democracy is a state where the sovereign people, guided by laws of their own making, 'to for themselves everything that they can do well, and by means of delegates everything that they cannot do for themselves. It is therefore in the principles of democratic government that you must seek the rules of your political conduct. But in order to found democracy and consolidate it among us, in order to attain the peaceful reign of constitutional laws, we must complete the war of liberty against tyranny; ... [S]uch is the aim of the revolutionary government that you have organized.... But the French are the first people in the world who have established true democracy by calling all men to equality and to full enjoyment of the rights of citizenship; and that is, in my opinion, the true reason why all the tyrants leagued against the republic will be vanquished. There are from this moment great conclusions to be drawn from the principles that we have just laid down. Since virtue (good citizenship) and equality are the soul of the republic, and your aim is to found and to consolidate the republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct must be to relate all of your measures to the maintenance of equality and to the development of virtue; for the first care of the leg islator must be to strengthen the principles on *which the government rests. Hence all that tends to excite a love of country, to purify moral standards, to exalt souls, to direct the passions of the human heart toward the public good must be adopted or established by you. All that tends to concentrate and debase them into selfish egotism, to awaken an infatuation for trivial things, and scorn for great ones, must be rejected or repressed by you. In the system of the French revolution that which is immoral is impolitic, and that which tends to corrupt is -counterrevolutionary. Weakness, vices, and prejudices are the road to monarchy... ... Externally all the despots surround you; internally all the friends of tyranny conspire.... It is necessary to annihilate both the internal and external enemies of the republic or perish with its fall. Now, in this situation your first political maxim should he that one guide, the people by reason, and the enemies of the people by terror. If the driving force of popular government in peacetime is virtue, that of Popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice that is prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a

consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie. DESPOTISM IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY What is our goal? The enforcement of the constitution for the benefit of the people. Who will our enemies be? The vicious and the rich. What means will they employ? Slander and hypocrisy. What things may be favorable for the em. ployment of these? The ignorance of the sansculottes.1 The people must therefore be enlightened. But what are the obstacles to the enlightenment of the people? Mercenary writers who daily mislead them with impudent falsehoods. What conclusions may be drawn from this? 1. These writers must be proscribed as the most dangerous enemies of the people. 2. Right-minded literature must be scattered about in profusion. What are the other obstacles to the establishment of liberty-' Foreign war and civil war. How can foreign war he ended? By putting republican generals in command of our armies and punishing those who have betrayed us. How can civil war be ended? By punishing traitors and conspirators, particularly if they are deputies or administrators; by sending loyal troops under patriotic leaders to subdue the aristocrats of Lyon, Marseille, Toulon, the Vende, the Jura, and all other regions in which the standards of rebellion and royalism have been raised: and by making frightful examples of all scoundrels who have outrage liberty and spilled the blood of patriots. 1. Proscription [condemnation] of perfidious and counter-revolutionary writers and propagation of proper literature. 2. Punishment of traitors and conspirator, particularly deputies and administrators. 3. Appointment of patriotic generals; dismissal and punishment of others. 4. Sustenance and laws for the people. ___________________________________________
1 Sans-culottes literally means without the fancy breeches worn by the aristocracy. The term refers generally to a poor city dweller (who wore simple trousers). Champions of equality the sans-culottes hated the aristocracy and the rich bourgeoisie.

Signposts - Gender Issues in Post-Independence India

by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan Catherine Hall, " Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities," Feminist Review 44 (1993): 97-103. Sylvia Walby, "Woman and Nation," in Mapping the Nation ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso Press, 1996) pp.235-245. Nira Yuval -Davis, "Gender and Nation," Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (October 1993): 621-632 GENDER AND NATIONALISM: RETHINKING BASIC CONCEPTS Fall Trimester 1997 Monday 1:40 - 5:20 pm Seminar Room 208, 2d Floor Faculty Tower The course is designed for anyone whose research interests concern gender studies and nationalism, whether from a humanities or social science background. All those who might want to incorporate a gender dimension into their thesis are particularly encouraged. This course explores the ways gender informs our understanding of nationalism. Nationalism, as you all know, is one of the issues of moment that compels the concern of scholars and politicians alike, especially in its "ethno-national" form. But most of the discussions about nationalism neglect the issues of gender. This neglect is in part a result of the way nationalism is conceptualised within a traditional understanding of the political, an understanding which leaves little space for problematizing gender. This is one reason, no doubt, why Benedict Andersen's idea of the national community as an "imagined community" has become so influential in feminist analysis of nationalism. The imagined community -- a cultural artefact which creates bonds of identity and belonging -opens up a space for considerations of gender. Each week we will explore the usefulness of gender as a category in the analysis of nationalism, by exploring how nationalism is tangled up with all the knotty categories of population, race, class, gender, family, reproduction, sexuality, the body, and so forth. Basic concepts in gender studies such as patriarchy, the sex/gender dichotomy, the public/private dichotomy will also be covered. Wherever possible, specific examples of the new scholarship relevant to gender and nationalism in CEE/fSU countries are incorporated into the syllabus.

Seminar Format, Class Readings, and Requirements

This course is designed as a seminar. Each week a short lecture will introduce the topic and the main questions it raises; the lecture will be followed by student presentations. There will be a seminar break and then discussion. Students are expected to participate actively in discussions (each student will receive a packet of the readings in photocopied form). Attendance in class is mandatory. Each student will make at least one class-room presentation. Attendance and the presentation account for 10 % and 30% of the final grade, respectively. Also are required 2, 5-7 page papers; topics will be assigned by, or in consultation with, the instructor, each comprising 30% of the grade. See the Notes on Papers for guidelines. First papers are due in class on November 3; the second on December 15th. Week 1: What is Gender/What is Nationalism? (September 29) A. Gender Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex, in Towards and Anthropology of Women, ed. Ranya Reiter, (NY, 1975).157-210. Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis," in Gender and the Politics of History (1988), pp. 28-50. Michael Roper and John Tosh," Introduction," in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800 (NY: Routledge, 1991) pp. 1-24. Ann Snitow, "A Gender Diary," in Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (1990), pp. 9-43. B. Nation Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Press, 1991) Introduction and Chapter 3.Partha Chatterjee, " Whose Imagined Community," The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Chapter 1 Katherine Verdery, " Whither 'Nation' and Nationalism'?" Daedalus (Summer 1993): 37-46. C. Gender and Nation Catherine Hall, " Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities," Feminist Review 44 (1993): 97-103. Sylvia Walby, "Woman and Nation," in Mapping the Nation ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso Press, 1996) pp.235-245. Nira Yuval -Davis, "Gender and Nation," Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (October 1993): 621-632. Week 2 Framing the National Problem: Difference and Exclusion(October 6)

Biology,History,Politics
Thomas Laqueur, "Politics and the Biology of the Two Sexes," in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), pp. 194-207. Denise Reilly, "Does Sex Have a History," in 'Am I that Name?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (Minnesota, 1988) pp. 1-17. Carole Pateman, "The Fraternal Social Contract," in The Fraternal Social Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1989) pp.33-57. Joan Scott, "Deconstructing Equality -Versus- Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism, " in Conflicts in Feminism, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (1990), pp. 134- 148. Martha Minow, Making All the Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) pp. 1-23. Elizabeth V. Spellman," Now You See Her, Now You Don't," in Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press,1988) pp.160- 213.

Debate Problem:L'affaire Foulard

Max Silverman, "The Revenge of Civil Society," in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe eds David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (London: Routledge, 1997) pp.146-158. Carole Delaney, "Untangling the Meanings of Hair in Turkish Society," Anthropological Quarterly 4 (October 1994):159-172. Arlene Elowe MacLeod, "Hegemonic Relations and Gender Resistance; The New Veiling as Accommodating Protest in Cairo," in Rethinking the Political eds. Barbara Laslett et. al (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. 185209. Week 3 (October 13) Coloring in the Lines: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Benedict Anderson," Patriotism and Racism," in Imagined Communities (London: Verso Press, 1991) pp.141- 154. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and its Discontents: Women and the Nation," Millennium 20 (1991): 429-43. Evelyn Brooks Higgenbottham, " African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," in Feminism and History ed. Joan Scott (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp.183-208. Werner Sollors, "Introduction," The Invention of Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) pp ix.- xx.... Nancy Leys Stepan "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," in Feminism and Science eds. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 121-136. Carol Smith-Rosenberg, " Captured Subjects/Savage Others: Violently Engendering the New American," Gender and History 5 (Summer 1993): 177195.

Psychoanalytic dimensions
Sander Gilman, "Introduction: What Are Stereotypes," and "The Madness of the Jews," in Differences and Pathologies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) pp.15-35; 150-162. Sigmund Freud "On Narcissism" in The Freud Reader ed. Peter Gay (NY: Norton,1989) pp. 547-563. Michael Ignatieff , "Nationalism and Toleration," in Europe's New Nationalisms eds. Richard Caplan and John Feffer (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 213-231. Slavoj Zizek, " Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead," Dimensions of Radical Democracy (ed. Chantal Mouffe)(London: Verso Press, 1992) pp. 193-207. Week 4 Constructing National Foundations: the Nation-State and the Space of the Political (October 20):

Citizenship and Rights

Katherine Verdery, "From Parent -State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe," East European Politics and Societies 8 (Spring 1994): 225-255. Jean Leca, "Questions of Citizenship" in Dimensions of Radical Democracy ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso Press, 1992) pp. 17-30. Linda Colley, "Womanpower,"inBritons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) pp.237-281. Anne Phillips, "Universal Pretensions in Political Thought," in Destabilizing Theory: Feminist Debates, eds. Michle Barrett and Anne Phillips (1992), pp. 10-30. Wendy Brown, " Finding the Man in the State," Feminist Studies 18 (Spring 1992): 7-34. Nira Yuval-Davis, " The Citizenship Debate: Women, Ethnic Processes and the State." Feminist Review 39 (Winter 1991): 58-68. Barbara Einhorn, "New for Old? Ideology, the Family and the Nation," in Cinderella Goes to Market (1993), pp.39-73. Peggy Watson, " Civil Society and the Politicisation of Difference in Eastern Europe," Das Argument Julie Mertus, "Gender in Service of Nation: Female Citizenship in Kosovar Society," Social Politics (Summer/Fall 1996) : 261-272.

Post Nationalism
Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, "Changing Citizenship in Europe," in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe eds David Cesarani and Mary Fulbrook (London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 17-28. Mary Kaldor, " Cosmopolitanism Versus Nationalism: The New Divide?" in Europe's New Nationalisms, eds. Richard Caplan and John Feffer (NY: Oxford

University Press, 1996) pp. 42-58. No class October 27 (First Papers due in class next week November 3) Week 5:: Men on Film: Sexuality, Ethnicity and the Nation (November 3) First Papers due in class Sonya Michel, "Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality and Disabled Veterans in American Postwar Films," in Gendering War Talk eds Miriam Cooke and Angela Wollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) pp. 26-279. Bill Brown, "Global Bodies/Postnationalities: Charles Johnson's Consumer Culture," Representations 58 (Spring 1997): 24-48. Katrina Irving," EU-phoria?: Irish National Identity, European Union, and The Crying Game," in Writing New Identities: Gender and Immigration in Contemporary Europe eds. Gisela Brinker- Gabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1997) pp. 295-314. Film: The Crying Game Week 6: Nationalism and Male Sexuality (November 10)

Sexuality
Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, selections. Carole Vance, " Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality," in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? eds. Anja van Kooten Nierek and Theo van der Heer (1989), pp. 13-34. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985) selected chapters: introduction, Manliness and Homosexuality, Friendship and Nationalism. pp.1-47; 66-89.

Violence
Barbara Ehrenreich, " Foreword," Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies v. 1 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) pp. ix-xvii and selections. Lynn Segal, " The Belly of the Beast (II) Explaining Male Violence," Slow Motion: Changing Masculinites, Changing Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990) pp. 233-271. Ann Fausto-Sterling, "Hormones and Aggression: an Explanation of Power?" in Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (NY: Basic Books, 1985) pp. 123-154.. Richard Collier, "After Dunblane: Crime, Corporeality and the (Hetero) Sexing of the Bodies of Men" (unpublished paper, Law School,Newcastle UK: 1996) Linda Colley, Manpower, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) pp.282- 319. Rozanne Panchasi, " Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France," Differences 7 (1995):109-140.

Week 7 : National Bodies and Masculinity: Nation, Empire and Ethnicity revisited (November 17) George Mosse, "Max Nordau: Liberalism and the New Jew," in Confronting the Nation: Jewish and Western Nationalism (Waltham MA: Brandeis University Press, 199) pp. 161-175. Mrinalini Sinha, " Gender and Imperialism: Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity ed. M.S. Kimmel (London: Sage Publications, 1987) pp.217-231. Ann Stoler,"Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia," ed. M. di Leonardo, Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1991) pp. 51-101.(reprinted pp. 209-266.) Lora Wildenthal, "Race,Gender and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire, in Tensions of Empire eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997) pp. 263-283. Ann McClintock, "Family feuds: Gender, nationalism and the family," Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61-40. Claire Nolte, " Every Czech a Sokol!: Feminism and Nationalism in the Czech Sokol Movement, " Austrian History Yearbook 24 (1993): 79-100. Marilyn Lake, "Mission impossible: How men gave birth to the Australian nation," Gender and History 4 (1992): 305-22. Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean, " Post-mortem on the Presidential Body, or where the Rest of Him Went, " inBody Politics eds. Michael Ryan and Avery Gordon ( Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994) pp. 155-171. Week 8 Nation and Motherhood(November 24) Anna Davin, Imperialism and Motherhood in Tensions of Empire eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997) pp. 87-151. Karen Offen, "Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin de Sicle France," American Historical Review 75 (1988): 648-676 . Cornelia Usborne,"Pregnancy is the woman's active service. Pronatalism in Germany during the First World War," in The Upheaval of War eds. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (London: Routledge, 1992) pp. 389-416. Gisela Bock ,"Racism and Sexism in Nazi German: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilisation and the State," When Biology Became Destiny: women in Weimar Germany ed Renate Bridenthal et. al. (NY: 11983) pp. 271-296. Gail Kligman, "Political Demography: The Banning of Abortion in Ceausescu's Romania," in Conceiving the New World Order eds. Fay Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) pp. 234-255. Wendy Bracewell, "Women, Motherhood and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism, " Women's Studies International Forum 18 (5/6) 20 pp.

Svetlana Slapsak, " What are Women Made Of?-- Inventing Women in the Yugoslav Area ," in Writing New Identities: Gender and Immigration in Contemporary Europe eds. Gisela Brinker- Gabler and Sidonie Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1997) pp 358- 378. Dubravka Zarkov, "Pictures of the Wall of Love: Motherhood, Womanhood and Nationhood in Croatian Media," European Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1997) : 305-339. Greta Slobin, "Ona-- The New Elle-Literacy and the Post-Soviet Woman," in Europe's New Nationalism, eds. Richard Caplan and John Feffer (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 337-357. Week 9 :The Costs of War (December 1)

Self-sacrifice and citizenship

Genevieve Lloyd, " Selfhood, War, and Masculinity, " Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory (eds. Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross)(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987) pp. 63-76. Renata Salecl, " The Fantasy Structure of Nationalist Discourse," Praxis International 13, 3 (October 1993): 213-223. Sarah Benton, " Women Disarmed: The Militarization of Politics in Ireland 191323," Feminist Review 50 (Summer 1995): 148-72. Rada Ivecovic, " Women, Nationalism and War: " Make Love Not War, " Hypatia 8 no. 4 (Fall 1993): 113-125. Linda K. Kerber, "May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation, " Women, Militarism, and War (eds. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Shelia Tobias (New York : Rowman and Littlefield, 1990) pp. 89-103. Shelia Tobias, " Shifting Heroisms: The Use of Military Service in Politics," Women, Militarism, and War (eds. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Shelia Tobias (New York : Rowman and Littlefield, 1990) pp. 163-185. Nira Yuval-Davis, " Front and Rear: The Sexual Division of Labor in the Israeli Army, " Feminist Studies 11 (Fall 1985): 649-675. Week 10 The Sexual Violence of War (December 8) Adam Jones, " Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia," Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (January 1994): 115-134. Ruth Seifert, "The Second Front: The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars, Special Issue, Women's Studies International Forum, ed. Barbara Einhorn (1995). Rada Ivekovic, "Mistaken Identities: The Feminine Subject and Violence," (unpublished 1995) 8pp. Silva Meznaric, " Gender as an Ethno-Marker: Rape, War, and Identity Politics in the Former Yugoslavia," Identity Politics and Women (ed. Valentine M. Moghadam)(Westview Press, 1994) pp. 76-97 Evelyne Accad, "Sexuality and Sexual Politics: Conflicts and Contradictions for

Contemporary Women," and "An Occulted Aspect of the War in Lebanon," in Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (NY: NYU Press 1990) pp. 11-26; 27-38. Catherine MacKinnon, "Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace," in On Human Rights (eds. S. Shute and S. Hurley (NY:Basic Books, 1993) pp. 83-109. Suzanne Gibson, "On Sex, Horror and Human Rights," Women: a cultural review 4 (1993): 250-260. Ruth Harris, " The 'Child of the Barbarian': Rape, Race and Nationalism in France During the First World War," Past and Present 141 (Nov. 1993):170-206. Nicoletta Gullace, "Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War," American Historical Review 102 (June 1997): 714-747. Week 11: Does the National Have a Gender? (December 15) Second Papers Due in class Andjelka Milic, "Nationalism and Sexism:Eastern Europe in Transition, in Europe's New Nationalisms, eds. Richard Caplan and John s (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 169-183. Tanja Rener and Mirjana Ule, "Nationalism and Gender in Post socialist Societies -- Is Nationalism Female? " in Ana's Land: Sisterhood in Eastern Europe (Boulder,CO: Westview Press 1997). Djurdja Knezevic, attractive nationalism (unpublished 1995) 3 pp. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, " What Ish My Nation," in The Post Colonial Studies Reader (eds Bill Aschcroft et al.) (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 178-80. Film: Henry V (Kenneth Branagh) Week 12 (Make up class, date to be agreed upon): Class Presentations