(Page 2 of 20) - Gender, Nation, Religion: The Discursive Construction of Identities in India's Democracy, 1952-1956 authored by Williams, Rina.

Gender, Nation, Religion:

The Discursive Construction of Identities in India’s Democracy, 1952-1956

Rina Verma Williams

University of Virginia

Abstract

Current social science holds that identities are socially constructed. Yet the insights of

constructivism still have to be operationalized. Most political science studies have taken
identities (whether ethnic, national, gendered, or otherwise) as independent variables, and used
them to explain political outcomes. This paper reverses the causal arrow and contends that
constructivism tells us that identities themselves require explanation. Accordingly, it takes
identities and identity construction as dependent variables, and tries to explain how a given set of
identities was constructed in one particular spatial and temporal context. Specifically, the paper
examines how religious, gender, and national identities were discursively constructed in early
postcolonial India, by examining legislative debates over the reform and codification of Hindu
family law in the 1950s. Two key conclusions emerged from the analysis. First, the discursive
construction of these different forms of identity was highly interconnected: the construction of
religion and nationalism could not be understood without gender; nor could the impact of
nationalism on religion and gender be captured by studying any of them in isolation. Both Hindu
socio-religious tradition and secular Indian nationalism were gendered constructs: gender was
constitutive of religious and national identity in this time period. Second, political factors were
central to how these discursive identities were constructed, at least at three levels: the democratic
political system; the state; and individual leadership. Accordingly, I suggest that identities are
not just socially but politically constructed; and as such, unraveling and explaining these
processes is a critical task for political science.

Introduction

It is widely espoused in current social science that identities are socially constructed.

Scholars have come explicitly to reject the assumption (if indeed they ever really espoused it)
that identities are primordial—deeply rooted in our biological or physiological makeup—in any
meaningful sense. For the most part, such “essentialism”—the view of identity “as a natural
instinct built into the biological structure of the individual [and] a powerful force driving the
thoughts and behavior of individuals”

—holds little sway among social scientists.

“Primordialism, never much more than a straw man, is virtually dead.”

Instead, we now view

identities as the products of individual and collective human agency, the social constructions of
social actors. Social scientists study identities based on the premise that “their existence depends
upon social practices, discourses and representations.”

This has been a predominant trend across

a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and (if latterly)
political science, as well as cultural, literary, colonial, and postcolonial studies. Rogers Brubaker
has argued this conception emerged from approaches as disparate as network theory, rational
choice theory, and poststructuralism and postmodernism.

This view of identity as socially constructed has characterized recent work on a wide

variety of different forms of identity, from ethnicity and nationalism, religion and race, to gender
and sexuality. “Recent years have seen…a growing attempt to demonstrate how all the key
categories of human existence, such as gender, race, class, community and generation, can be
shown to be socially constructed.”

With respect to nationalism and ethnicity, Brubaker noted

that “[n]o serious scholar today holds the view…that nations or ethnic groups are primordial,