Book Review |
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Behl, Natasha. Gendered
Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India. Oxford
University Press, 2019. (184 pages, ISBN: 9780190949426) |
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Natasha BehlÕs
Gendered Citizenship is a fresh and
rich contribution to the emerging literature of gender studies. She focuses
on the gender-aspect of the concept of citizenship, especially in the context
of Indian democracy. She juxtaposes the high claims of democracy of the
Indian state with the local realities of culture, religion, and caste system.
Beginning with a cold-blooded incident of rape of a young woman traveling on
a local bus, Behl employs the ethnographic
methodological approach to demonstrate the lived experiences, meaning-making
processes, and self-reflexivity of women in the public spheres of the
country. She critiques the so-called liberal claims of Indian democracy,
where gender based violence and exclusion of women is widespread. She points
out that although Indian women are visible on different public forums and
institutions, but they are always faced with the included-exclusion dilemma. |
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Behl argues that conventional
understanding of citizenship and democracy cannot help much to define and
understand the pervasive gender violence in either public or private sphere.
She exemplifies it by pointing to the theoretical and methodological blind
spots in the mainstream political science scholarship that have only led to
the re-production of gender blindness and legitimization of gender violence.
On her part then she takes a different line of understanding by rendering a
critical analysis of sexual violence law and an in-depth ethnography of the
Sikh community. Accordingly, she explores the contradictory nature of the
claims of Indian democracy, and argues that it has gravely affected its
institutions, sometimes marginalized its citizens, and put their lives at
risk. |
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One of the
most interesting aspects of BehlÕs book is
discussed in the second chapter; she upends longstanding academic assumptions
about democracy, citizenship, religion, and gender in Indian democracy. She
responds to a gap in the citizenship literature by developing a framework of
situated citizenship, which facilitates empirical analysis of exclusionary
inclusion in different contexts. Therefore, she explains that situated
citizenship establishes the truth that citizenship is more than a fixed legal
status; it is also a situated social relation. The concept explains how uneven
and unequal experiences are created, maintained and challenged in the private
and public spheres through social practices often compounded by gender,
caste, class, religion and nation. She mentions that situated citizenship and
exclusionary inclusion can be applied to lived-experiences of unequal
democracy in any part of the world, but especially the gender-based
experiences of unequal democracy in India. She further elucidates in chapter
three that how state and formal legal equality can operate in the form of
undemocratic and exclusionary methods. She shows that the mechanism of
exclusionary inclusion operates at state, civil society, religious community
and home levels, thus relegating women to the status of second-class citizen. |
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In chapter
five, she discusses that unlike prevailing academic understandings on the
relationship between secular state (democratic) and religious communities
(undemocratic) in India, some religious spaces and practices can be sites for
renegotiating democratic participation, and uncovers how some women engage in
religious community in unexpected ways to link gender equality and religious
freedom as shared goals. Therefore, through ethnographic study of Sikh
community, she underscores that religious communities can be resource for
womenÕs active citizenship and can resist their exclusionary inclusion. The
detailed ethnographic evidence of Sikh women and their experiences in
religious practices and spaces establishes that religion is not as oppressive
as perceived by many scholarships. She also shows that the experiences of
western liberal democracies and citizenship are different from developing
countries like India. A situated approach to citizenship establishes and
uncovers that some women actively engage in religious activities in quite
surprising ways and thus try to create egalitarian gender relations. The book
also contributes to the study of womenÕs agency in religious and devotional
organizations as well. It challenges the conventional understanding of devout
and religious women as either powerful or oppressed. |
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Behl takes up the case of Sikh
community due to certain interesting reasons. For example, Sikhs believe that
their faith and community practices are free of gender- and caste-based
distinction and discrimination. Even though, in fact, in the present day
India, Sikhs have much in common of their religious and cultural practices
with other communities. She takes Sikhs as a minority community that provides
an insight into the challenges of gender inequality in the democratic state of
India plagued with gender discrimination, caste system, classes, tribes, and
linguistic issues. The case of Sikh community also highlights the tensions
between state and religious community, the majority and minority religions,
and tensions among state, community and gender. Above all, the Sikh community
provides examples of lived experience of gender inequality, which provide reflection
on womenÕs conflicting experience of sense of belonging in the state. In her
final chapters, she tries to address how one minority religious community in
India both uphold exclusionary inclusion and tries to resist it. By employing
in-depth interviews and participant observation, Behl
highlights how Sikh women struggle to escape the gendered norms, religiosity,
and the discourse of purity, pollutedness, and
inferiority by associating themselves with devotional organizations such as Sukhmani Seva Society. In this
way they try to enact their citizenship rights through their religious
commitments. She thinks that Sikh women participation in such religious
associations can educate scholars and civil society activists about the
present impasse in the discourse related to state, religious community and
gender in India. |
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Noreen Naseer |
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Assistant Professor |
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Political Science |
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University of Peshawar. |
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Email:noreen_naseer@uop.edu.pk |
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