The Politics Behind The Hijab Row And Women’s Bodies

The politicisation of women’s bodies has been actively pursued by religion and state as a part of the manifestation of their respective perceived identities and intent. The latest controversy where a group of hijab-clad young women were denied entry to Government PU College for Girls in Udupi citing wearing hijab against the uniform rules of the college is viewed and articulated from binaries of religion/secularism and patriarchy/feminism.

The controversy has usually resulted in pro and anti-hijab factions. One defends hijab as a right to practise one’s religious identity, and the other argues against it in a secular public institution. However, the overarching contestations boil down to body politics.

Bodies of women owing to the patriarchal attribution of society have been for long subjugated to a spatial manifestation of power. It is used as an instrument to purport a perception of a group’s culture or identity, making bodies at the core of political order symbols of status and power.

Body, especially women’s, becomes a site where power is negotiated and contested. Such controversies often and again exhibit women being made a conduit of structures and institutions to achieve respective desired ends.

First, cornering the hijab as a transgression against a secular public space does not hold much currency as vermilion donned women, men with turbans and men with religious thread on their hands actively engage in public places with a symbolic manifestation of their respective religious identities.

So, conservatives (masquerading as liberals) invoke what resembles French Laïcité (strictly segregating state and religion) for hijab. On the contrary, other religious symbols being a traditional Indian culture, is both inherently oxymoronic and explicitly exclusionary exhibiting majoritarianism.

Second, the hijab as a religious identity is somewhat borne out of complex history. The practice of veiling women predates Islam. It has appeared as a subsequent cultural effect of Greek, Persian, and Mesopotamian empires mixed with the Semitic peoples of the Middle East, where women covered heads.

It was not until a generation later, after Muhammad’s death, that Islamic women started veiling themselves, which was conventionally confined to the upper class. By the end of the 11th century, the four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence emerged, namely Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanafi and Hanbali that codified Islamic actions, further enunciating their notion of women’s attire.

Maliki and the Hanafi schools instructed women to cover the entire body except for the face and hands. The more conservative Hanbali and Shafi’i schools required Muslim women to cover their entire bodies, including their faces and hands. However, veiling practices are not strictly exclusive to these schools and are subject to territorial laws, regulations, and culture.

For instance, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 mandated women for a compulsory hijab. Furthermore, post 9/11, women were subjected to intersectional discrimination of Muslim women, where the hijab became the target of religious and racial discrimination.

Third, from the perspective of patriarchy, women who made a mark in history and registered their names in power structures traditionally dominated by men disguised their identities and resorted to male attires and behavioural attributes to create a space for themselves legitimately.

Hatshepsut, Joan of Arc, Rani Laxmi Bai and Dorothy Lawrence are a few names amongst the plethora of testimonials of women asserting themselves in situations and structures traditionally reserved for men. A heteronormative dressing and behavioural attributes provided them with access and validation of what they intended to achieve and do in their lives.

Their sexual identities, including clothing styles, was a significant impediment. Fast-forwarding it to 2022, the scenario somewhat remains the same: clothing style has created an issue of access and social control of the body. Feminist scholars have argued that the body is both socially shaped, politically inscribed, and shaped by containment and control practices.

Fourth, body politics from a feminist point of view emphasises women’s discretion and authority over their bodies. For example, the visuals from the college explicitly indicate how hijab-clad women drew a sharp reaction from the saffron-clad gang of boys shouting ‘Jai Shree Ram’ indicates how men avow their dominance in public spaces.

Contemporary societies sexually segregate access to political power, religious life and thus socio-cultural and political world exhibited through a body.

So, whether the hijab becomes a symbol of assertion or structural subjugation, a woman’s body becomes an arena of manifestation of religious or national identities. The imagination of men sits at the helm of power, either legally citing hijab as an aberrant to ‘secularism’ or citing it as an intrinsic element of one’s ‘religious’ identity.

French philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault built on Karl Marx’s arguments on body and class later argued that the body is a central point for analysing the shape of power. His work on body and power has steered feminist theorists of how the “body has been historically disciplined” and subjected to many essentialist claims.

His concepts of ‘bio-power’ and ‘anatomo-politics’ argued that governmental and institutional power impact everyday people. Such insinuations shape people’s subjectivity of how they ‘perceive’ themselves as individuals.

It commences as an externally imposed discipline that is gradually internalised, making individuals their disciplinarians. Head coverings for women irrespective of religion (including veil of a catholic nun, ghunghat (veil) in the Indian subcontinent) throughout history have gone through a series of complex spatial and temporal contestations through the intersection of religion and culture where men were predominantly at the helm of the power structure.

As the hijab imbroglio gains traction nationally and garners global headlines, the pro and anti-lobby comprising of nations, institutions and leaders, claim on a woman’s body continues to perpetuate. In another instance, a young Kashmiri girl school topper was derided on social media by a faction for not wearing a hijab.

A woman’s body continues to be the core of families, socio-political institutions, economies, shaping states and civil societies ideationally and logistically.

The girls fighting for it are cosmologically conditioned to wear it from childhood (however, as adults, it is their discretion to continue to wear it or shun it), and on the other hand, young boys creating ruckus against it are filled with abomination and vengeance, are emblematic of furthering propaganda of reductionist majoritarian imagination of the Rashtra.

It is high time for men to take a back seat as it is a woman’s discretion to view hijab as systematic or structural oppression or a symbol of resistance or emancipation or mere a part of their everyday identity.