Unequal citizens

In a Minority: Essays on Muslim Women in India, edited by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon; Oxford University Press, 2005; pages 396, Rs.645

THIS book is part of a larger project that seeks to look at the different dimensions of the lives of Muslim women in India. A part of the research on this project, supported by the Ford Foundation in India, was published last year by Oxford University Press as Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India, co-authored by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon. Another such research, titled Educating Muslim Girls: A Comparison of Five Cities in India, will soon be out from the publishing house Women Unlimited.

The idea of this project has been to map the diversity of Muslim women's lives in India through, first, a "baseline, multi-issue all-India Muslim Women's Survey (MWS)" on the status of both Muslim and Hindu women, so as to show the similarities and differences between their status and also to bring out the possible factors underlying these similarities and differences. The conclusions of the survey formed the subject of the first book.

The present collection, edited by the same authors, draws upon, tests and enlarges the field of the inquiry through micro-level studies on different regions or/and aspects of Muslim women's lives. Through it, as the acknowledgements state, it seeks to "change the terms of debate by locating them within the context of a wider society, rather than persist in seeing them only as wards of their community".

The need for such a change in the terms of debate is obvious; but not just in the case of Muslim women. Hindu women too get treated as wards of their community, as do women belonging to other religions. The growth of communal politics has contributed to this trend in the case of all women. Personal laws of a community are being projected by communalists of all varieties as signifiers of community identity. And not just Muslim women, but also Sikh, Christian, Jain and even Hindu women are finding that the struggle for reform of personal laws within their communities is that much more difficult.

Tribal women are finding their better, and more equal, status vis--vis men more difficult to retain in the face of the imposition of Hindu norms by Hindu activism, specifically the aggressive campaigns by activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the activities of the Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad; the revival of indigenous honour killings; khap panchayats; witch-hunting; and so on. These are ultimately more violent means for retaining women as wards of the community.

The rightward shift in mainstream political perspectives, along with the neo-liberalism in economics virtually mandated by imperialism, impacted adversely on all women and made the fight for gender justice that much more difficult in the past two decades, a factor not given due weightage in the context of Muslim women. The polarisation along religious lines has not "tied" Muslim women alone "even more firmly to their religious community and personal law"; women of all communities have experienced similar clipping of their wings. On the flip side, the community has emerged as a "formidable force" not just in the case of Muslims but in the case of all communities, organised along caste or religious lines. The state, on its part, has been impartial in its abdication of responsibility with regard to women of all communities.

Educational backwardness and poverty as determinants of status will show much in common between Dalit and Muslim women, while a lower participation in employment may reflect commonalities with caste Hindu women in certain regions and castes. Invariably, class situations cut across religion in determining status.

What is specific to Muslim women is that prejudices about Muslims get carried over and influence to a very great extent the perceptions that most people have of Muslim women and their status both within the community and in the wider society. But then, it is not just a matter of perceptions alone. These perceptions have their consequences.

There is a very real discrimination against Muslim women, as part of the very real discrimination against Muslims in general. The consequence of this is not merely that Muslim women are more firmly "tied" with their communities in the sense of their rights getting subsumed within those of the community, or their religious identity getting foregrounded. There is more to it than just this communal closure.

The very real discrimination that Muslim women, along with Muslim men, face also creates the basis for a shared experience - in fact, shared life - with others discriminated against on grounds of caste and gender. Some of the data presented in the collection can certainly lend themselves to this conclusion and could well be the most valuable contribution of this or any other such collection on Muslim women, which go beyond looking at Muslim women as located within the conflicting claims of gender, community and personal law. This collection, like other such collections, also dispels some of the prejudices that sustain and reinforce what the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has been propagating through its shakhas and the saffronised media, which today seem to have attained the status of popular common sense.

Some of these prejudices, current in Indian society, are outlined in the essay by Sabina Kidwai, titled "Images and Representations of Muslim Women in the Media, 1990-2001". In a clear statement, the essay shows how in the period under consideration "media coverage of the Muslim community invariably assumed its complete insulation from larger processes and trends in Indian society, and diagnosed its members to be suffering from one shared problem - Islam". Through an analysis of the actual coverage in newspapers and on television, she succeeds in proving that issues relating to Muslim women received media attention only when they involved a religious and legal controversy, they appeared in the news only when there was a religious controversy, and when issues with socio-economic dimensions arose they were also given a religious colour in the mainstream secular Indian society.

The essay by Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey focusses on madrassa education and rural Muslim girls in western Uttar Pradesh. Its conclusions go directly against the propaganda of the Sangh Parivar. It shows that the enrolment of girls is increasing in rural areas owing to the rising cost of education in other schools, and that given a choice most Muslims would prefer other options. It also shows convincingly that Muslims do want to educate girls, but if the resources are limited they prefer to use those resources to enrol boys elsewhere and the girls in madrassas. One gets the impression from a reading that other cultural factors are secondary and could be overcome if the major obstacle of costs could be overcome.

Farida Abdullah Khan's study on Muslim girls in higher education in Kashmir argues that the major obstacle to women's education in Kashmir was the absence of institutions of higher education exclusively for women. But with the opening of some institutions women's education made rapid strides, and this would have resulted in some real gains but for the general deterioration of the political and social climate for women as a result of the political situation in Kashmir in the past two decades. More than community-specific factors, it is these developments that have created a setback for women's advancement in the State.

The studies dealing with political participation note the under-representation of women in general in State Assemblies and Parliament (essay by Karen Deutsch Karlekar) and the under-representation of Muslims, which form the context for Muslim women's low representation. Aboobacker Siddique's case study of Muslim women's participation in politics in Kerala lends itself to more nuanced conclusions, although one must understand that Kerala cannot become the basis for a larger generalisation, in view of the fact that the panchayati raj system has shown far more dynamism in Kerala than elsewhere while Kerala society is more conservative than societies in many backward regions of the country.

But what can cause surprise to most people are the conclusions that emerge from the studies dealing with personal law. Although, of course, such facts have always been available, there is a conspiracy of silence where the media are concerned and a failure to state clearly that Muslim women are not much worse off than women of other religious communities. Therefore, the essays by Sylvia Vatuk and Nasreen Fazalbhoy, which present data and arguments centred on the issues of marriage, remarriage, divorce, maintenance and inheritance, are important and can be employed usefully by secular activists to engage with Muslim women's rights, while countering communal propaganda and opposing Sangh Parivar-sponsored alternatives for changes in the Muslim personal law.

As happens with such collections, one may have several differences on many aspects of the arguments and not all micro-studies lend themselves to a meaningful generalisation. But that does not detract from the general usefulness of the book for all those who are interested in women's studies or even general studies on South Asia.

Nalini Taneja teaches history at the University of Delhi.