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Women and the Hindu Right
Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (eds.)
New Delhi: Kali for Women (1995, reprinted in 1996), 337 pages.
The book under review is one of the earliest pioneering efforts dealing with the phenomenon of women's mobilization under the banner of right-wing Hindu communalism, which has been a very significant aspect of the Indian political scene in the nineties. The authors/editors of the volume need to be congratulated for the political and intellectual foresight in discerning the need of the time and analyzing a phenomenon which is both new and politically important. Other books and studies on the subject have subsequently appeared, but the importance of this one remains.
There are some important features of the political situation in the nineties, in general, and of the mainstream women's movement in India that need to be noted here, as these constitute the context in which this book has appeared. One of these has been the appearance of the forces of Hindutva or right wing Hindu chauvinism on to center-stage from the political periphery. This, in a sense, began with the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a four-hundred year old mosque built by the Moghul emperor, Babar. The event was one of crucial significance and should not be underestimated. It was indeed a watershed in the life of post-independent India that has and will continue to have...