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Literary Review
GENDER STUDIES
An ambivalent relationship
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`The Scandal of the State is one of the most intelligent and cogent analyses of this relationship [between the women's movement and the state].'
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CATHERINE MACKINNON'S famous characterisation of the state as being either omnipotent or impotent as far as women are concerned, may justifiably be modified by the Indian Women's Movement (IWM), for whom it is simultaneously both. Practically every major issue taken up by it has addressed the state, whether colonial, newly independent, postcolonial or present-day. Their relationship has always been ambivalent. Acknowledging, as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan says, that "living in the nation entails living with the state", the IWM has nevertheless also accepted that bargaining with the state can be a dangerously compromised and co-opted activity.
The Scandal of the State is one of the most intelligent and cogent analyses of this relationship, and makes a major contribution towards theorising it in the Indian context. The recognition that women "exist", says the author, whether as a problem, an instrumentality or an interest group, shapes the state and its functions in distinctive ways. At the same time it also implicitly constructs women as sexualised subjects, gendering them in relation to men, as well as to communities. But it also differentiates among women, in law and in policy, depending on religion; or in terms of categories — "good' and "bad", normal and deviant, working and non-working, and so on. Consequently, many of the contradictions that bedevil their status as citizens of a modern secular nation are to be located in their being, at once, unitary (as women) and differentiated (by sex, religion and community). Sunder Rajan therefore engages centrally with the law because of the "law's hegemonic role in the production of gendered identity"; this is also why transactions between the women's movement and the state — whether of exchange, demand, address or negotiation — may be understood, primarily, within the context of law and citizenship.
After a masterly review of feminist debates on the state, the author focuses on six critical events in the recent past to support her argument: the case of the child-bride, Ameena, and the question of custody and choice; the forced hysterectomies of mentally challenged women in Maharashtra; the prostitution question; the uniform civil code; female infanticide in Tamil Nadu; and the politics of Phoolan Devi's surrender. All of these (except, perhaps, the last) hinge on the vexed subject of women's sexuality as it brings issues of child marriage, work, custodial institutions, minority identity, and so on, to crisis.
More than half the women in India are under-age or child-brides when they marry. Why should Ameena have become a "case" for the courts when no other child-marriage has ever been invalidated? The author suggests that even though Ameena may not have been perceived by the state as "one of us" she became "ours", because she had been victimised by a foreigner. The state, as pater familias, stepped in to claim her as belonging to the nation, in much the same way as abducted women were reclaimed post-Partition, within a framework of "rescue and custody". Her status as a child, moreover, allowed the courts to sidestep the issue of her (Muslim) identity (as it did not with Shahbano) and focus instead on "the best interests of the child".
Nowhere near as easily resolved was that other "custody" incident, the mass hysterectomies of mentally disabled women in Pune, also ostensibly carried out in their "best interest", i.e., to safeguard them from sexual assault. Decoded, this reads as safeguarding the state from dealing with unwanted pregnancies as a consequence of sexual assault, rather than protecting the women. In both cases, safe custody was anything but for Ameena and the women concerned.
Depending on where you stand on the issue, unregulated sexuality, or sexploitation, lies at the heart of the prostitution/ sex work debate. The feminist response has been either to call for its complete abolition because it institutionalises sexploitation, or to demand that it be legalised because it is "work", an economic activity, engaged in by "choice". Whether they use the human rights discourse or the civil rights one, both are agreed that a) prostitutes are not criminals, and b) that they need the state's protection. The state, on the other hand, treats it as "deviant" sexuality and therefore, criminal, but contrarily, also a necessary evil for the containment of legitimate male sexual appetite. The issue is complicated and complex — are prostitutes "victims" or "agents"? Can they actually exercise meaningful choice when driven by poverty or necessity? Is "sexwork" work? Sunder Rajan's is one of the most lucid expositions of this debate that I have read because of her ability to distinguish, analytically and conceptually, between prostitutes as agents, and prostitution as structural exploitation. The masculine state's complicity in the latter lies in its tacit support of the institution while claiming the moral high ground in its legislation. This being so, one wishes the author had also taken up the alarming rise of sexual trafficking across the subcontinent, for without this any discussion on prostitution remains incomplete.
The patriarchal continuities and complicities between state and society come together in a neat fit in personal laws. The failure of the state to provide any kind of relief (legal or otherwise) to women from violence, injustice, discrimination or oppression experienced in the family, community or society; and the necessity of identifying spaces for them in the public sphere that "derive from functions and identities other than the reproductive, the symbolic or the legal", leads the author to explore the emancipatory potential of collectivities of women formed in civil society, collectivities that are neither biological nor primordial. She suggests that women as workers, economically active and recognised as such by state and society, might be able to realise and define themselves as "national subjects", thus avoiding the personal laws trap.
Well, yes, but. The public sphere of civil society may be relatively "unmarked" by communitarian identities, but it's still a gendered space and, sooner or later, women do return to the private, personal domain.
The importance of this book lies in its clear-sighted examination of women's subject citizenship, and its strength, in its sustained and rigorous analysis of the state's record on it.
The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Permanent Black, 2003, Rs. 595.
RITU MENON
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