Review of Tanika Sarkar’s Religion & Women in India: Gender regimes

Tanika Sarkar’s latest publication is an ambitious book, Religion & Women in India: Gender, Faith, and Politics 1780s-1980s, spanning two centuries, a sweeping survey of the intersections of gender, religion and politics in India between the 1780s to 1980s. The horizons of its ambition are further expanded by the inevitable opening up of the categories of “religion” and “faith”, which are mutually imbricated in other processes that re-ordered gender practices over this period — “new market relations, contractual labour regimes, political vicissitudes and vast cultural changes.” In addition, Sarkar, like any feminist today, holds that gender itself is not predicated on sexual differences alone because these differences are “entangled in diverse socio-political formations such as class, race, region and historical contexts, all of which come together to co-constitute gender regimes.” Defining moments Within this framing set up in the first chapter, the book examines some key defining moments, beginning with the 18th century, noting at each moment the way in which internal patriarchy and the hierarchical caste order operates, running parallel to, or intersecting with the colonial order. The first moment is the colonial constituting and codifying of “religious” rules and practices on marriage and family into laws, and identifying women’s inferior status in India as a justification for colonial reform and rule. This is the moment at which, says Sarkar, the woman’s body entered the public gaze, gradually becoming “a speakable, writable and readable body.” Work and labour The next theme, also spanning the 19th to early 20th centuries, is work and labour, and how women’s access to paid work becomes transformed as well as limited simultaneously, by the nature of economic transformations under colonialism. Women, says Sarkar, were active political subjects but “in some ways, politics created yet another site where women’s subordination was reinvented.” Following this, Sarkar then moves to examining sites of “holy and unholy gender” — women saints, hijras, courtesans and sex workers, interracial relationships, same sex desire and love, and prisons and lunatic asylums.