SUNY series in Hindu Studies. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016. xxv, 291 pp. US$85.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-6031-4.
Scholars of India and South Asia have long been attuned to the central role of women and gender in Hindu nationalism. Dashing Ladies expands a robust literature on this topic. A first “wave” of this literature arose in the 1990s and 2000s, after the BJP’s (Bharatiya Janata Party, or “Indian People’s Party”; the political wing of the Hindu nationalist movement in India) initial ascent to national political power in India—an ascent built on a series of gendered campaigns and controversies in the 1980s and 1990s. This early literature documented and provided critical snapshot analysis of Hindu women’s participation in religious nationalist movement politics in this period. Since about 2010, a “second wave” of literature has made significant progress in theorizing women’s participation in Hindu nationalist politics. It is this second wave of literature that Dashing Ladies exemplifies and to which it makes significant contributions.
Dashing Ladies is an ethnographic study of lower-level women politicians and members of the Shiv Sena, a militant regional political movement and party based in western India and centered in Mumbai. Founded in 1966 as a grassroots, ethnic and linguistic “sons of the soil” movement advocating for the Maratha people of the region, it has long and often—though not continually—allied with the broader Hindu nationalist movement at the national level. The ethnographic research for this book was completed over the course of about ten years between 2003 and 2013 (25), and took place across three urban sites in the western state of Maharashtra: Mumbai and the nearby growing cities of Pune and Nashik.
The first three chapters expound the concept of dashing, which the book identifies in Shiv Sena women’s discourse as an embodied, transgressive construction that not only captures but constitutes lower-level party women as political subjects. Dashing is how such women push beyond gendered normative social bounds to “get things done” for the party, for themselves, and for their communities, constituents, and clients. Subsequent chapters examine the politics of Shiv Sena women’s visibility—in morchas (public marches) and andolans (agitations)—and “invisibility” beyond the male gaze in women-only rituals and events that cross borders of public and private: haldi-kumkum and women’s picnics (chapters 5, 6); illustrate the dynamics of how women and men relate to each other within the party, some of the on-the-ground dynamics of the Sena’s alliance with the BJP, and how Sena women balance the demands of public life with the demands of the home or domestic sphere through the process of what they call “adjustment” (chapters 4, 8); and the role of Sena women as brokers in real estate and slum development in Filmcity, on the margins of Mumbai, and caste and class privilege in juxtaposition with disadvantage for a Shiv Sena leader in the red-light district of Pune (chapters 7, 9).
As only good books can, Dashing Ladies advances our understanding of several questions while raising others. Amongst the key empirical contributions of the book are its examination and exploration of how Shiv Sena women construct and deploy political power on the ground, rather than at the upper levels of party hierarchy, where many studies focus; and its careful documentation of precisely where the regional Shiv Sena diverges from Hindu nationalism at the national level. The latter is critically valuable especially for understanding how the alliance works (or doesn’t) on the ground—and thus for understanding where interests converge and diverge between the two movements. To have explored the convergences more thoroughly could potentially illuminate divergences within the Shiv Sena itself, especially between upper and lower-level party leaders and functionaries. What do upper-level leaders gain from the alliance, which seems otherwise virtually nonexistent—if not actually contested—in practice at the lowest levels?
The central theoretical contributions—dashing and political matronage—are important frameworks for illuminating a range of types of women’s political participation. While dashing is well specified as a concept, political matronage, as well as the relationship—if any—between dashing and political matronage raise questions. Political matronage appears at the beginning and end of the study, whereas dashing substantively frames the actual presentation of the work in the first part of the book. Political matronage is contrasted with more traditional theories of political patronage: these take women almost exclusively as clients, whereas political matronage recognizes women’s transactive roles at lower-party levels in both producing and disbursing political resources. How do dashing and political matronage pay off, or do they, for the women who practice them? Do they move women up the party ranks? If not, what do women gain from them, politically? These are pertinent questions given the book’s insightful illumination of the politics of women’s visibility in the party and lower-level women’s ambitions to rise higher in the party and/or win electoral office.
Dashing Ladies does much to dismantle core dichotomies that structure western feminist thought and the underlying frameworks with which women’s participation in conservative, right-wing, religious, and often violent movements and politics are widely analyzed. Families and domestic arrangements, the book convincingly shows us, are not “always already” or only oppressive for women; and the public-private distinction is blurry at best, analytically misleading at worst. The imperatives of ethnographic research are exemplified in how the book takes women’s words and actions seriously. How to balance this imperative with critical interrogation of party rhetoric and discourse—for example, mara-mari (violence) as feminine virtue (198–199), or significant forms of boundary-drawing and out-grouping along identity lines, including anti-Muslim as well as anti-north Indian (“UP/Bihar”) othering—remains a tripping point for studies of women in Hindu nationalism.
Ultimately, only a thoroughly researched, deeply thought-out, and well-written book would answer as well as raise important questions such as these. Dashing Ladies significantly advances our understanding of how women participate in Hindu nationalist politics, and deserves a careful and widespread reading for its contributions to the second wave of literature on this phenomenon.
Rina Verma Williams
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, USA