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COPYRIGHT 2004 Plenum Publishing Corporation
Identifying and describing the position of women, in a large, urban and complex society like contemporary India is both difficult and unrealistic. For this paper, therefore, I rely mostly on data projected by the media and such facts and figures that are often seen as indicators by both activists and policymakers. The media play an immense role in both producing and reproducing the enormously complex entity called society by simultaneously highlighting issues and creating and reinforcing values, attitudes and ethics. While mentioning Indian society, I refer mostly to the urban areas that are directly affected by the global circulation of "commodities, people, capital, technologies, communications, images and knowledge" (Long 1996: 37) that is recognized as globalization. The secondary data are supplemented by my fieldwork among an untouchable community in urban Delhi, where I researched for my Ph.D. during the late 1970s. This was the time when the city was entering the phase of global economy but still retained vestiges of the old city of Delhi, founded by the emperor Shahjehan. Broadly the issues that can be taken as an index of the deteriorating position of women in the age of neoliberalism (Harrison 2002: 49) can be attributed to "structural violence," the "symbolic, psychological and physical assaults against human psyches, physical bodies, and sociocultural integrity that emanates from situations and dominant institutions" (Harrison 2002: 53).
It is in recognition of this violence that this work contributes to feminist theory as feminist scholars like Hart (1991: 95) recognize a truly feminist approach as one that redefines the notion of politics to include "struggles over socially constructed meanings and definitions and identities." Thus drawing upon Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic violence," a feminist analysis is able to recognize the insidious processes of stereotyping and image construction that is a tool of dominance. While colonial India suffered from the racist constructions of the colonial rulers, post-colonial India is reinventing such images by the "cultural blindness" of its western educated elite. The pervasiveness of "western" values globally and universally has prompted Ang (1995: 402) to remark that:
From the perspective of "other" women (and men), then there is no illusion that white, western hegemony will wither away in any substantial sense, at least not in the foreseeable future.
What Ang asserts is the impossibility of a feminism that is not colored by white, western feminism for:
Feminism functions as a nation which "other" women are invited to join without disrupting the ultimate integrity of the nation (Ang 1995:407).
A country like India suffers from intensive internal stratification and Indian women are certainly not a uniform category. "Surveys carried on in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal show how, in the same village, some privileged castes can be found to have enjoyed near universal adult literacy for close to several decades, while literacy rates are still close to zero among disadvantaged castes, particularly for females" (Dreze and Sen 1995: 197). The colonial period was particularly successful in the creation of a western educated elite and "female intelligentsia" (Pearson 1982: 136), and all social movements in India, including the feminist movement, and most policy decisions have largely been the monopoly of this elite section.
Kapadia (1995: 163), in her insightful analysis of untouchable women in Tamil Nadu, has also decried the fact that "urban Brahmin elites are in the forefront of women's emancipation." Feminism, when it did enter into India, was definitely an elite and westernized phenomenon propagated by English-speaking, well-educated middle class women, who looked upon rural and peasant women as in need of "empowerment," little realizing that they perhaps had more space than upper class women already weighed down by a patriarchal middle class morality. Mehrotra (2001), who has done research on women's movements in Delhi, writes: "Public smoking was acquired characteristics of large number of activists; some also consumed liquor. Their mannerisms were fairly westernized, conversation medium usually being English. I observed that these features often acted as unconscious barriers between activists and other middle class women clients. Education in public and private schools and later degrees from professional institutions seem to have contributed significantly to their personalities" (Mehrotra 2001: 11). Thus a handful of women who would be progressive by western standards and definitions did not serve much purpose in India where the majority of women belong to urban slums and rural areas. In most cases the kind of liberties that middle class women sought are already available to such marginal women, who smoke, drink and lead far less sexually claustrophobic lives than upper class/ caste women in India. In fact women who did matter, like Indira Gandhi, Medha Patkar and Gaura Devi, were accepted by the Indian majority as goddesses in the traditional mould rather than feminist in the modern sense.
The most well meaning efforts to improve the lot of the marginalized are obfuscated by the goals of "modernity" read as synonymous with western knowledge. Even though the effects of such "development" are apparent, yet the reluctance to accept the truth, the truth that non-western societies are unable to shake off the blinders of western hegemony, only towards their self destruction, is apparent only to a few like Ong (1995).
The gains of westernization in terms of technological advancements and individual emancipation are offset by the negative aspects of the devaluation of the human qualities glaringly evident in third world urban cities like Delhi and Bombay. There is a phenomenon of unequal development, defined not in terms of "a lack of economic means as such, but disconnectedness from the global network that determines a new type of poverty, namely exclusion from the dominant social and economic processes in society" (Nas and Houweling 2003: 298). Such are the migrants, ethnic minorities, lower castes and women, who are failing to reap any benefits of globalization. In fact Dreze and Sen (1995: 154) present data that indicate that many of the advantages are being monopolized by the socially advantaged, giving rise to further deepening of cleavages in social relations. For example, they show that "change in sex-ratio at older age may be due to the fact that adult men disproportionately benefited from improvements in living conditions and medical care." After the economy was opened up there was a drastic decline in numbers of females, where 1991 showed the lowest ever sex-ratio in India at 197 females per 1000 males.
A reading through the week's newspapers would make clear that female infanticide, female feticide, rape and the burning of women for dowry are some of the ills against women's bodies that are reported at an alarming rate (Anderson and Moore: 2000). Added to this is a media-generated assault on their symbolic identity and personal worth that prioritizes superficial qualities such as skin color, slim figures and shining hair as the ultimate goals of womanhood.
In this paper, I argue that such assaults on womanhood in India are not rooted in tradition or "lack of western education" but are very much products of the "liberalization" and the new cult of consumerism forced on every part of the world by the dominant culture of capitalism. The background and reasons for this mass takeover have been discussed at length by many scholars and in many forums (see, e.g., Harrison 2002 and Hobart 1993). Moreover the images of Indian women constructed over the colonial and post-colonial periods surfer from an elitist bias that is definitely "western." The emergent feminism in India is likewise battling for identity under a label that makes it western by definition. As Bannerjee (1990: 128) has described for elite women in Bengal during the colonial period, the construction of the bhadra-mahila (gentle woman) was strongly colored by a mixture of western and Indian values that worked towards reinforcing patriarchy at the expense of whatever "space" the women may have enjoyed in pre-colonial Bengali society. Similar processes were observed in other parts of India as well. Most of the progressive women's forums, in colonial times, like the Bhagini Samaj started in Pune in 1916, the Prayag Mahila Samiti started by Rameshwari Nehru and the All India Women's Conference in 1926, were all efforts of elite, upper class women as well as foreigners like Annie Besant; Mohanty (1991: 51) has referred to the colonization of knowledge and especially the construction of "feminist interests as they have been articulated in the U.S. and Western Europe."
Globalization as a process has been understood in many ways and many forms and the exact nature of globalization cannot be presented or understood in dichotomous terms as either this or that. In the same manner the approach to women's problems and gender issues must be subjected to intensive scrutiny before any conclusive remarks can be made, if at all. A complex relationship exists between women's roles and position and globalization. Relying on empirical studies and reports, it becomes clear that in India, the process is multifaceted and needs to be understood in a historical perspective and although the process of globalization may actually have started earlier, the colonial period makes a good beginning to observe the consolidation of its effects.
The Colonial Period
The symbolism of a dominant masculine culture taking over a feminized emasculated one has been used a number of times by such post-colonial scholars as Chatterjee (1993), and graphically illustrated in books such as FAR PAVILLIONS and AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS where the white male rescues the native woman in distress, one who is going to be burnt as sati, establishing once and for all the truths of a "primitive culture" with barbaric traits and the need for the white male rescuer in the form of European colonization. In reality British rule in India did sufficient damage to the indigenous legal and land tenure systems and the local forms of social organization to make such sections of...
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