Volume-XII, Special Issue, April 2026 |
Ruptures and Continuities:The‘Women’s Question’and Cultural Entanglements in Colonial and Contemporary India Richa Biswas, SACT -1, Department of English, Jamini Roy College, Bankura University, West Bengal, India |
Received: 30.03.2026 | Accepted: 07.04.2026 | Published Online: 10.04.2026 | Page No: 298-305 | ||||
DOI: 10.29032/ijhsss.vol.12.issue.specialW.294 | |||||||
ABSTRACT | ||
This paper examines different trajectories of the women’s question, which has been entangled in the crossfire between socio-cultural reforms and conservative, community-oriented revivalism. Since the 19th century, the women’s question became the battleground for social reformism, orthodox nationalism, and the colonizing mission of civilization. So, to dig into the contemporary ‘aporias’ of the women’s question in India, it needs to be historically analysed through the 19th century intersection of religion, gender, and cultural nationalism. The question of women's rights or agency was compromised by the nationalist forces and the Hindu orthodox religion following the socio-cultural reforms around the ‘sati tradition’ or widow immolation, widow remarriage, and the ‘age of consent debate’, etc. While social reformists corresponded to such religiously sanctioned practices as cultural persecution, orthodox religious and cultural nationalists projected such customs as a unique rhetoric of national culture pitted against Western culture. At the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, the nationalist revivalist forces successfully pushed the women’s question into an inner domain of discourse. However, this paper will analyse how this tension between two dimensions has persisted and spilled over into recent debates in the post-colonial phase. The new postcolonial nation has to ensure the rights of women, as it promised equal rights to each and every citizen, but in the newborn nation, women's rights issue is challenged by the same strain of unresolved negotiation between popular demands of revivalism versus right-based entity of reformism, where the secular state needs to address this dilemma of recent socio-religious controversies.For example, the controversial judgement of Shah Bano case, the court case on the death of Roop Kanwar as alleged ‘sati’,controversies regarding lifting the ban on menstruating women`s entry in the Sabarimala Temple of Kerala or the notorious coinage of the term ‘love jihad’ by Hindu ultra nationalist forces to launch a campaign to coerce the conjugalrights of women etc. Therefore, this article will briefly examine how the women's question was debated and discussed in the Hindu Code Bill for the protection of women's rights, and whether those promises were diluted in the tug of war between revivalist community identity and constitutional identity protected by the modern secular state in the post-colonial nation. For doing that, the paper would reengage with the women’s question, investigating whether thecontemporary instances ofthe Sabarimala Temple Entry ban and the viciously constructed idea of Love Jihadare deepening traditional Hindu patriarchal values of gender subservience. | ||
Keywords: Ruptures, Continuities, Agency, Hindu Code Bill, Sabarimala Temple Entry Ban, Love Jihad, Hindu majoritarian nationalism |