Who Rules India? A Few Notes on the Hindu Right

La extrema derecha hindú llegó al poder en India en 2014 y en la actualidad controla un buen número de estados de la Unión, además de ostentar el gobierno federal. Esto ha contraído una serie de cambios en las reglas del juego político en el país. La primera parte de mi artículo indica el alcance de este poder, sus consecuencias inmediatas y aquellas otras a largo plazo. Haré una semblanza histórica del extremismo hindú, así como del desarrollo de su estructura a lo largo de nueve décadas. Finalmente me centraré en dos casos instigados contra las minorías religiosas y la libertad de pensamiento y elección, explicaré su relevancia en los planes de la derecha hindú y el lugar que ocupan en su estrategia.Hindu extremism captured state power in India in 2014, and, at present, it controls a large number of regional states as well as leading the ruling coalition at the Centre. This has led to significant and wide ranging changes in Indian polity and in political norms and values, and the first part of my article will briefly indicate their range, immediate consequences and long term implications. I will outline the historical evolution, and unpack the structural distinctiveness, of the Hindu Far Right to explore its mobilisational strategies and its ideological agenda over nine decades. In the final part, I will focus on two specific sites of violent hate crimes against religious minorities and against freedom of individual and collective thought and choice.I will finally try and explain their relevance to the larger agenda of the Hindu Right and their broad direction

Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai: Rewriting Consent and Conjugal Relations in Colonial India

Through an examination of the late nineteenth century case of Dadaji Bhikaji v Rukhmabai this article traces the history of the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights (“RCR”) in Hindu law in colonial India. It highlights the importance of caste in situating the life and trials of Rukhmabai in their wider social, colonial, and legal contexts. Following the methodology of the global feminist judgements projects, the paper also offers a re-written judgement for Rukhmabai’s case located in 1886. This new judgement, while bound by the legal rules of the time, puts forward an alternative application of the doctrine of RCR, one that treats the issue of consent as central to such suits. It argues that the legal transplant of RCR ought not to have been applied to Hindu marriages which are often entered into in childhood and makes a case for taking into account female consent to both marriage and to conjugal relations

Entretien avec Tanika Sarkar. Écrire et enseigner l’histoire des femmes et des subalternes en Inde

Née en 1949 à Calcutta, dans une famille d’enseignants, Tanika Sarkar commence ses études universitaires au Bengale avant de rejoindre la Delhi University où elle soutient en 1981 sa thèse de doctorat. Celle-ci, intitulée Bengal 1928-1934: The Politics of Protest, s’inscrit dans le profond renouvellement que connait l’historiographie indienne à la fin des années 1970 et au début des années 1980. Sous l’influence des écrits d’E. P. Thompson et de l’histoire radicale britannique, les postulats ..

Mothers and Non-Mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men\u27s reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The paper argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively