Articles by Kumkum Sangari

Amrita Chhachhi, Farida Khan, Gautam Navlakha, Kumkum Sangari, Neeraj Malik, Ritu Menon, Tanika Sarkar, Uma Chakravarti, Urvashi Butalia, Zoya Hasan THE Anveshi article (Anveshi Law Committee, is Gender Justice Only a Legal Issue? Political Stakes in the UCC Debate', 8, 1997) criticises tendencies within the 'Indian women's movement' that, in its opinion, have focused very narrowly and exclusively upon legal reform. The main thrust of such reforms, moreover, is described as a monolithicising intention that would like to erase all plurality of caste and community, custom and practice in the name of abstract, universal gender justice, thus denying women as well as a range of marginalised communities the right to autonomy. The universalising tendency of this version of gender justice betrays a biological essentialism that fails to take on board other aspects of women's social existence. Such tendencies are most evident among feminists who, according to Anveshi, are termed as 'upper caste, Hindu and urban' in other words, they share some social characteristics of the hindutva politics that they otherwise criticise. However, presumably because of shared social space, they 'unwittingly' lapse into some of the language and agendas of their political adversaries: the demand for a uniform or gender just civil code would be one such instance, the campaign against obscenity would be another. As examples of such immature and politically naive feminist thinking, Anveshi has singled out Forum against Oppression of Women from Bombay and Working Group on Women's Rights from Delhi.

This essay reviews the current debate between maintaining religion-based personal laws and instituting a uniform civil code in the context of gender inequality and Hindu majoritarianism. It challenges the assumptions on which positions that advocate legal pluralism and defend personal laws have based their case.

Khurja Riots 1990-91 Understanding the Conjuncture Uma Chakravarti, Prem Chowdhury, Pradip Dutta, Zoya Hasan, Kumkum Sangari, Tanika Sarkar Elections have become an increasingly central element in the conjunctures which have produced communal riots. In Khurja in 1990-91 tension and violence mattered much more to Hindu communal parties than to other national political parties who have also been responsible for using them for electoral gain. Given the long-term strategy of the BJP to capture power at the centre, the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign alone was insufficient: though it could demonstrate that Hindu sentiments had not been 'respected' by the state, it could not establish that Hindus were physically endangered. Therefore while the campaign organised Hindu consciousness and 'ideological' needs around a central symbol and a projected act of violence, the accompanying riots tried to orchestrate the need for 'protecting' and 'preserving' Hindu interests against the projected threat from Muslims.

Kumkum Sangari In an economy where the labour of women and the surplus production of the peasant and artisan are customarily and 'naturally' appropriated by the ruling groups, the high Hindu traditions sought to encompass and retain the management of spiritual 'surplus', and to circumscribe its availability along lines of caste and gender. In this spiritual economy, the liberalising and dissenting forms of bhakti emerge as a powerful force which selectively uses the metaphysic of high Hinduism in an attempt to create an inappropriate excess of transcendent value grounded in the dailiness of a material life within the reach of all This paper attempts to understand the specific character of Mirabai's bhakti as it finds shape within the overlapping yet contradictory configuration of the patriarchal assumptions of the medieval Rajput state, prescriptive brahminkal texts, and the female devotional voice as it develops in earlier and contemporary compositions of male bhaktas. What emerges is, firstly, that though the prescriptions of the smritis and Puranas do not survive as law, they are available as ideology which shapes the customary domain and self-description of Rajput ruling groups and constitute the historical moment in which Mira lives. Secondly, in the breaking and remaking of patriarchal relations, Mira's bhakti marks as well as belongs to a longer historical moment in which the prescriptions of the smritis and Puranas are selectively internalised, and the customary nexus of religious practice is translated into metaphors and emotional structures. Thirdly, though Mira's compositions are themselves ambivalently situated, there are significant differences in her personal practice and in her ideological location when compared to earlier and contemporary male bhaktas. And, finally, etched into Mira's enterprise is not only the difficulty of being 'original' in an oral tradition, but also the recalcitrance and the precariousness of personal rebellion.