4 years in the past, after I was travelling throughout the northern Indian state of Haryana to report on “rape tradition” there, I met a slight-bodied younger girl at a neighborhood district court docket. She, a Dalit, was there to battle a case in opposition to 4 upper-caste males who had raped her.
We spoke for a number of hours. She informed me about her latest separation from her husband of eight years and the bodily violence she confronted, together with repeated rape, all through her marriage.
What struck me was that she was valiantly combating a authorized battle in opposition to strangers who raped her, however had by no means thought of submitting a case of home abuse in opposition to her husband. Her story made me realise that ladies don’t all the time make decisions that seem fashionable and progressive. That their decisions are knowledgeable by the social, historic and private contexts they exist in. That feminism doesn’t have one face.
The continuing hijab controversy within the southern Indian state of Karnataka made me consider that younger girl in Haryana. Why? As a result of in Karnataka, younger Muslim women are combating their faculties, Hindu right-wing mobs, the state authorities and even the state’s judiciary to have the ability to hold their hijabs on in school rooms. That is unquestionably a feminist battle – in any case, these girls are combating in opposition to patriarchal makes an attempt to police their costume. However not everyone seems to be seeing it that approach.
Hindu right-wing teams, and even sure sections of India’s elite intelligentsia, seem satisfied that these girls will need to have been “brainwashed” by their oppressive households or the Islamic orthodoxy to need to put on this garment. Smartphones and tv screens throughout the nation are stuffed with provocative reviews and pictures implying that younger Muslim girls should not have company. That they should be tricked into considering this fashion. That they should be saved from their very own households and tradition – they should be saved from themselves.
After all, these factors of view aren’t sprouting out of the bottom fully organically. Amid elections in 5 states, together with India’s most populous and maybe politically vital state Uttar Pradesh, there have been political machinations at play. The hijab controversy was being amped up by the governing BJP and the broader Hindu proper wing to legitimise and whitewash their anti-Muslim attitudes and rally their supporters behind an emotive trigger throughout elections.
The Hindutva venture to ‘save’ Muslim girls
As scholar Hilal Ahmed not too long ago wrote, the “Hijab controversy has uncovered the interaction between patriarchy and communalism” in India. However that is on no account a latest improvement – the Hindu proper wing has been pretending to “save” Muslim girls from Muslim males to additional their very own anti-Muslim agenda for many years.
For instance, in 1986, when the Congress authorities handed an act that overturned the Supreme Courtroom’s Shah Bano resolution – which had established that Muslim divorcees are entitled to gather alimony from their former husbands like divorcees from different religions, and was opposed fiercely by some Muslim teams – the BJP emerged as one of many foremost defenders of the rights of Muslim girls. Their foremost gripe was, after all, the “appeasement” of the Muslim group by the Congress authorities, however they nonetheless introduced themselves as working to save lots of Muslim girls from Muslim males.
Some 30 years later, in 2019, they as soon as once more tried to imagine the position of the “saviour of Muslim girls”, after they handed laws criminalising triple talaq (Muslim prompt divorce). By no means thoughts that the exact same occasion, and mobs related to it, have been behind numerous insurance policies, legal guidelines and violent agitations, from the tearing down of the Babri Masjid to the discriminatory citizenship legal guidelines, that devastated Muslim communities, together with numerous Muslim girls, through the years.
The BJP’s obvious urge to “save” Muslim girls, after all, doesn’t point out any actual concern over their wellbeing and, the truth is, has little or no to do with them. Usually, within the politics of saving, the one who is being “saved” is much less vital than the particular person from whom they’re being “saved”. For the Hindu proper wing too, the particular person they’re “saving”, the Muslim girl, is of little significance – the one which issues is the particular person they’re saving her from: the oppressive, violent, sexually deviant Muslim man. The Muslim girl is nothing however a software to vilify the Muslim man.
And that is the first motive why the Hindu proper wing is attempting to forestall Muslim girls from carrying the hijab regardless of their protests: Their efforts don’t have anything to do with “saving” girls, and all the things to do with making Muslim males, and Islam usually, seem backward and oppressive.
The hijab via the Western gaze
Feminist critic Gayatri Spivak, in her influential essay, Can the Subaltern Converse, famously outlined the abolition of the Hindu ceremony of sati (self-immolation of ladies after the dying of their husbands) in India by the British as “a case of white males saving brown girls from brown males”.
Since then, the phrase has routinely been used to explain Western pretences to “save” brown girls, particularly Muslim girls, from their very own tradition and communities, with the ulterior motive of demonising – and even criminalising – Muslim males, and furthering the West’s personal political and strategic agendas. And for the West, “saving brown girls from brown males” has remained a major excuse for wreaking havoc on the remainder of the world for hundreds of years.
After the 9/11 terror assaults, for instance, the US tried to categorise its invasion of Afghanistan as an try to “save” Afghan girls. In November 2001, then First Girl Laura Bush delivered a radio tackle to the nation, claiming that America’s “battle in opposition to terrorism” in Afghanistan was concurrently a “battle for the rights and dignity of ladies”.
Hijab – and different kinds of head and face coverings utilized by Muslim girls internationally – has lengthy been on the centre of those efforts. Certainly, the West has traditionally considered the hijab as a logo of feminine oppression and waged quite a few authorized and cultural wars in opposition to it, typically regardless of the protestations of the ladies carrying it.
It’s hardly shocking that an nearly equivalent warfare in opposition to the hijab is at present being waged in India supported by sure sections of the intelligentsia.
Over time, many within the higher echelons of Indian society, each these on the left and the proper, adopted a Western gaze, and got here to see the hijab the way in which white individuals do: a logo of oppression, a cry by Muslim girls to be “saved”.
Ultimately, the continued hijab controversy in Karnataka just isn’t solely an interaction between patriarchy and communalism but additionally the adopted Western gaze. Hindu nationalists who’re claiming they’re on yet one more mission to save lots of Muslim girls, in opposition to their will, from Muslim males and tradition, are simply enjoying the identical recreation they’ve performed for many years. These supporting this “saviour narrative” and likewise claiming to be “feminists”, in the meantime, are adopting tropes lengthy utilized by the West to subjugate, rule over and devastate the International South.
So how ought to feminists, and anybody else who claims to care for girls’s rights, reply to this newest controversy? Properly, they need to shed their conceitedness and acknowledge that Muslim girls don’t want “saving” – neither by Hindu nationalists nor by elite liberals.
They need to recognise that Muslim girls have company, and a voice. And all that they want is for individuals to pay attention.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.