Hindutva Feminism: Gender, Desire, and Politics in an Urban Indian Community

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the life-worlds of middle-class Rajput Hindu women and their families living and working in a middle-class neighbor in Jaipur, Rajasthan’s urban capital. I trace the development of a unique middle-class feminine political subjectivity in Hindu India alongside the emergence of a form of “Hindutva feminism” that marries the rhetoric of international gender development with the majoritarian, anti-Muslim, caste-ambiguous language of the historical Hindu nationalist movement. I argue that the development of a middle-class Hindu national feminist political subjectivity reflects larger patterns of self-making occurring in in the contemporary Hindu nationalist movement. This self-making blends the contemporary desires involved in developing the individual self, the self in the context of a rapidly socially and technologically changing world, and the role of women in building the modern world with Hindu nationalist rhetorics that reify Brahminical patriarchy and prioritize Hindu women as the symbolic cultural “hearts” of the imagined Hindu rashtra (state). Aswomen deploy this strategic marriage of identities, they provide the structural backbone for the legitimatized use of violence against Muslims and others who threaten Hindu homogeneity and the preservation of savarna (high-caste) patriarchy.