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| Militarisation, Nation and
Gender: Women's Bodies as
Arenas of Violent Conflict
Rubina Saigol Recent feminist theories of nationalism
have pointed out that the Qaum (nation) is essentially feminine in
construction. The nation is narrated on the body of women who become an
emotionally laden symbol of the nation, self, the inner, spiritual world
and home. One's motherland or maadar-e-watan, as it comes to be called,
becomes invested with the kind of erotic attraction felt towards women,
especially in the figure of the mother. The country comes to be
appropriated, represented and contained within words which have strong
romantic, erotic as well as maternal connotations. The desire for this
land/woman/dharti is constructed as masculine desire; the desire to
possess it, see it, admire it, love it, protect it and die fighting for it
against rivals. Since the desire for women gets transferred
on to the nation and women's bodies come to signify the nation, communal,
regional, national and international conflicts come to be played out on
women's bodies. These bodies thus become arenas of violent struggle. Women
are humiliated, tortured, brutally raped, and murdered as part of the
process by which the sense of being a nation is created and reinforced. The first part of this paper will examine
the ways in which gender ideology lies at the heart of the production of
nationalist and militarist thought in Pakistan. The second part will look
at how women's bodies were used during Partition as part of a national
battle to create Pakistan and India. Militarisation and the Erotics of
Nationalism Pakistan complicates and enriches a more
general understanding of the gendered construction of the nation. Pakistan
as an idea was imagined in opposition to Hindu/India within the parameters
of the two-nation theory. There are constant attempts at the level of
popular and official discourse to assert Pakistan and Islam's difference
from India and Hindus; in fact these two are often represented as the
exact opposite of each other. When self-definition depends so desperately
on real or imagined difference, this difference has to be asserted
aggressively, consistently and violently. Most States maintain large
standing armies for the purpose of protecting and maintaining the
boundaries of the Self against encroachment, conquest, invasion and
intrusion by the 'enemy'. These armies are provided with the latest
weapons of mass destruction to enable them to enforce internal cohesion
and integration, while sealing off the borders against the threatening and
polluting outsiders. Militarisation thus becomes the foremost imperative
of the nation-state, frequently its number one priority even at the
expense of the welfare and happiness of its citizenry which it claims to
protect. The concept of militarisation is being used
here not merely to denote a large, standing army equipped with the latest
nuclear and conventional weapons. Militarisation, in a wider and more
comprehensive sense, entails the effects of militaristic thinking on an
entire society. This happens when the whole society becomes so permeated
by violent imagery, thought, emotion, cognition and imagining, that it
becomes inconceivable to solve any conflict without resorting to the force
of arms. All institutions of society become saturated with violence and
ideas of combat, battle, fighting, blood, martyrdom, victory, defeat,
heroes and traitors become a part of everyday life even in civilian
matters. In such cases, even the language of the military is borrowed and
internalised by the civilian institutions, for example, words such as
'strategy', 'plan of action', 'targets' have become part of common usage
in the departments of population, education and social welfare. Violence
becomes so much a part of everyday consciousness that its brutal effects,
its painful consequences and its tragic outcomes are obliterated. The nation-state, as a form of legitimised
violence, inscribes itself on the mind at both the conscious and
unconscious levels. This is done through imagery which has immense
evocative power through its associations with other objects which are
invested with desire. The desire for objects of love is displaced on to
the nation-state which becomes a highly erotic entity. It becomes the
object of desire, the subject of poetry and song and it comes to be
eulogised in the mass media, textbooks and public monuments. A complex and intricate relationship
develops between the predominance of military values, love and desire for
the nation-state and gender ideology. This relation is articulated through
the construction of the nation state as mother. As
Saba Khattak writes "The nation state is portrayed as the mother
which needs protection against the outside enemy. This
appeals... to a male macho psyche that is called for defense and
survival." As an example
of the 'protector' and 'protected', she quotes Sardar Assef Ali, the
former foreign minister, as having said that "to us the nuclear
programme is similar to the honour of our mothers and sisters, and we are
committed to defending it at all cost." This kind of imagery is clearly evident in
our nationalistic songs, poetry, taranas, milli naghmas, television plays
and popular films. A song from the old movie Aag Ka Darya, (River of
Fire), which became very popular, goes: Ay Watan hum hain teri shama key
parwanon mein (Oh, Country you are the candle around which we, your
lovers, hover). Shama (candle) and parwana (the lover) are commonplace
images used generously in Urdu poetry to denote the beloved and the lover
who yearns for her and burns in the pain of her love. In the song, the
country becomes the beloved, therefore feminine, and the lover represents
male desire. It reflects the displacement of private passion on to the
public sphere of the nation. There is ample evidence of the
appropriating and desirous male gaze in other nationalist songs. One of
the oldest comes from the national poet, Allama Iqbal, who wrote: Saaray Jehan say Acha,
Hindustan Hamara Hindustan is better than the
entire world Similar feelings are echoed later in a famous song: Chaand meri zamin, phool mera
watan The use of such romantic metaphors for the
country is widespread in nationalistic poetry. Massive amounts of passion
are displaced on to the land, which is invested with images normally used
for women and hardly ever used to describe men. The subject of desire is
male and the gaze is also that of a male looking upon a beloved. The
active/passive relation is easily discernible in the above poems as the
candle is passive and it is the masculine parwana who hovers around her,
the garden is passive and the active bulbul sings to it. The connection of woman with inanimate
objects, whether the moon, land, or candle is also common in our society
as is obvious in the common saying that most troubles are caused by zan,
zar and zamin, that is, woman, money and land. Here two inanimate objects
are placed side by side with woman, a living being whose connection with
land is once again asserted. The important thing to remember is that all
three are commodities which males desire and exchange among themselves in
the form of transactions and alliances. The imagery of nation-as-mother and
motherland evokes even more passionate responses. Nalini Natarajan argues
that the image of the mother is used because it "suggests common
mythic origins. Like the land (which gives shelter and 'bears'), she is
eternal, patient, essential." There seems to be a primordial sense of
connection between land (dharti) and mother; both are perceived as being
in need of protection; both are loved and admired; both are respected;
there a willingness to die for the honour of each. The irony is that while
the trope of mother-as-nation is so powerful in nationalist thought,
actual mothers and women are unequal, lesser citizens with less rights in
the nation-state's structure of power. The discriminatory laws about women
in Pakistan bear ample testimony to that. Nevertheless, the symbolic appropriation of
woman as mother into the nation-state carries immense emotional
investment. Women's primary entry point into the nation-state is as
mothers, as producers of strong, brave sons ready to fight to death for
the sacred land. It has been argued that "family play[s] such a
central role in the nation's public imaginings that motherhood could be
viewed as a national service." The idea of motherhood as a national
service is explicitly present in Pakistan's educational policies in which
the stated aim of female education is to produce good, moral motherhood
for the benefit of the family, nation and State. The fact that the symbolism of motherhood is intensely emotionally evocative can be gauged from the reaction to the US State Attorney's mindless and foolish remark regarding how easily Pakistanis would sell their mothers. It is a well-known fact that women are exchanged, bought and sold in some form or another in all societies, including American society. The remark was thoughtless and insensitive, but the reaction reveals the intensely threatened self which relies on moral motherhood to reproduce a nation of valiant sons. As Syed Talat Hussain observed: 'Mothers are the hub of most family
activity and even when they do not enjoy financial freedom and when they
are confined to their homes, they enjoy incredible power and clout over
the whole family. They run this basic unit of the society and command a
position on the scale of honour that cannot be compared with any other
relationship...Pakistanis do take their mothers very seriously'. In the quotation above, Hussain recognizes
the confinement and lack of financial power Pakistani suffer but refers to
their clout in the family. The family is the basic unit of society, as
well as the pillar of the State, and it is within the family that the
nation can reproduce itself, its sons and future mothers. It is the
family, therefore, that exercises the greatest control over female
sexuality in the name of the purity of the nation. Women's sexuality can
find legitimate expression only in national service through the family; it
is otherwise denied, controlled and hidden behind the chadar and
chardivari, the personalised boundaries placed around the woman,
equivalent to the boundaries, frontiers, and borders of the state, all of
which are under the protection of the son/mujahid or other male member. The figure of the mother appears in
nationalistic poetry and war songs as the bearer of brave sons, the
sacrificing brave mother who suffers in silence, the proud mother who bore
the shaheed and who salutes him. Women in war songs praise male valour and
the fact that the lover, or husband, or son, is a soldier. They praise his
war exploits, urge him on and promise eternal love in life or in death.
The following song was extremely popular during the 1965 war with India
and brought tears to the eyes of all who heard it. In this song, the
mother of a soldier who has just been killed in battle, is the speaker Ik Jinay Jamia si, o teri maan ay The one who gave you birth is your mother Here the various elements of nationalism
are all woven together; the sacrificing but proud mother, the connection
between the mother's lap and the land/grave, the soldier as the son of the
soil who was killed defending the honour of the motherland. Another
extremely popular song during the 1965 war had the following words: Ay rah-e-haq kay shaheedo, wafa ki tasweero Oh, martyrs in the path of righteousness The women of the nation are cast as those
who praise, applaud and eulogise the young males who fight in battle. The
glory, the greatness and the eternal life belongs to the men; the women
are in the background urging, encouraging, praising and supporting. An
essentially passive role is carved out for them to participate vicariously
in the masculine exploits of war. Giving birth to such sons, or having
such brave men as lovers is the greatest honour that a woman can receive.
In a lighter vein, the lover/fighter is praised for his position in the
army by a doting beloved who sings: Mera mahi chail chabeela, hai ni
karnail ni, jernail ni (My lively lover is a colonel, a general). Songs
like this one became so popular during the war of 1965 that the singer
Noor Jehan, who sang these at the front to entertain the jawaans, herself
became a kind of icon of the eulogising, doting, loving woman/mother. Nationalistic poetry and songs, which
connect the whole enterprise with the honour of mothers/sisters and one's
inner sanctum, enable the gory reality of war to be forgotten. The glory
attached to martyrdom and bravery in battle, the playfulness in the song
above, all mask the sordid reality of war - the mangled and charred
bodies, the brutalisation, the violence, the excruciating pain, the
needless wastage of precious life, the human degradation and misery, all
for state expansion and economic gain. When religion is added on to the
protection of state and nation, the emotional investment doubles. In the creation of the war mind-set, it is
not only young men who are conditioned to be the defenders of the faith,
the motherland and nation; women are similarly conditioned to believe that
they need defending by strong male protectors and that, as mothers, they
must raise strong sons. Women are taught to be convinced of their own
'inherent weakness' from childhood and it is in opposition to this
'weakness' that male 'strength' is constructed. Hence, as mentioned
earlier, gender ideology lies at the heart of the production of
nationalist and militaristic thought. This kind of complementary
construction of masculinity and femininity enables warlike nationalism to
be imbibed by the whole population, which feels empowered by a sense of
participation in the State's nationalist triumphs. Women not only participate in the imagery
of violence and war by creating and upholding it, they constitute the
bodies on which the narrative of gendered violence is written. War imagery
gets divided into masculine and feminine, for example, being defeated is
equal to being feminine and winning is equal to being masculine. A very
popular song during the 1965 war had the following verse: Uj Hinduan jang di gal cheri Today, the Hindus have stirred up war In this song not only is war referred to in
terms of a game and play which removes attention from its horrors, the
clear message is that war is not the play of women. In other words, war is
a masculine pursuit, the implication being that it requires strength,
valour and bravery which women lack. It is a manly enterprise, and Hindus,
who are here equated with women, are too weak to fight. The feminisation of Hindus is commonplace
in Pakistan. It is indicated in common sayings like "the banya is a
vegetable eater, he cannot fight". In textbooks, Hindus are
frequently presented as weak, timid, non-warlike and effeminate, in
contrast to Muslims who are represented as hypermasculine. It has been
noted that the "difference between male and female human beings is
exaggerated in warlike societies." With Pakistan's massive defence
spending, and the preponderance of warlike imagery, it can safely be
considered a warlike society. Pakistani war songs not only reflect this
hypermasculinity but exaggerate the imagery of blood, gore, death, weapons
and pain. A very popular song during the 1965 war went: jis rah se Aye ga Whichever direction you come from The enemy becomes a soldier who is dying in
battle and cannot even ask for a drink of water. The humanity of a dying
soldier is erased; he is merely the 'enemy' and has no existence as a
person. His pain is obliterated, his sorrow a matter of scorn. The whole
song is designed to show the immense power and prowess of the Pakistan
army which is represented as capable of inflicting exemplary defeat on
India. In the process, the army jawaan is also created as heartless and
inhuman. Strength is equated with cruelty. The idea of being unrelenting towards the
enemy is emphasised in other songs as well, possibly as a way of keeping
up the spirits of the jawaans. Another very popular song, also from the
1965 war days, is the following: Rakh jigra tey ho ja hun tagra Don't lose heart and become strong The conflict is presented as that between
Islam and kufr, which is not unusual. National war is couched in religious
terms in order to increase emotional investment in it and exploit people's
religious feelings. The aggressive impulses within human beings, meant for
survival purposes, are here harnessed to the national cause in which
manhood can be proved by a repeated bashing of the enemy. In Pakistan, children have always been indoctrinated in the discourse of war, bloodshed, fighting and manhood. In a song which emerged early on after Partition: Aao bacho sair karain tum ko Pakistan ki Come children, we will take you on a
journey around Pakistan By associating victory, power, glory and
fire with a hero and in turn associating the hero with religion, children,
who all grow up listening to this song, are infused with the desire to
become like the historically reconstructed heroes. The same message of
martyrdom, war, death and fighting turns up in virtually every history and
social science textbook. Aggressive impulses are directed towards a real
or imagined enemy, within and without, so that legitimacy can be provided
for organised state violence. As the song moves around the newly
independent state of Pakistan it comes to Bengal. Praise is lavished on
the beauty of the province, on its jute as a golden fibre and its ability
to withstand floods and cyclones. The last line is: yehan ka bacha bacha
upni qaum pe marne wala hai (Every child of this land is willing to die
for the nation). This is highly ironic given that in 1971 many Bengalis
did die for the nation, but the nation was not Pakistan; it was
Bangladesh. They died fighting against Pakistan. The nation is a fictional construct and at
any moment in time, its boundaries can shift re-determining who is
excluded and who is included. In 1947 East Bengal was part of the nation,
a part much derided by Ayub Khan and other West Pakistani leaders. In
1971, Bengalis became outsiders, enemies of the nation. This shows how the
homogenising process of the nation-state is replete with violence and how
tentative the identity of any nation-state is; nevertheless, people are
expected to lay down their lives for this precarious and contested entity. In the last part of the same song, the masculinity and strength of the men of the Frontier Province is established. yeh ilaqa sarhad ka hai, sub ki nirali
shaan yehan This is the Frontier region, everyone has a
unique glory Children are told here of how Pathans grow
up in the shadow of a gun and are ever ready to die for the nation. The
emphasis on the word jawaan repeatedly does not simply mean youth, but
virility, power, strength and valour. A recent incident shows how pervasive the
evocative power of battle, conquest and glory, and masculinity have
become. The Wills World Cup Cricket Championship in 1996 was described
almost entirely in terms of war. The cricket grounds were referred to as a
battlefield, the cricketers as warriors, coke bottles as missiles and
winning and losing became a matter of life and death. In this kind of
cricket nationalism, gender imagery was once again employed; the defeated
Pakistani team was sent a set of bangles signifying that losing to
arch-enemy, India, meant they must be feminine. Similarly, Wasim Akram was
accused of losing the 'battle' against India because he wears an earring. The concern about maintaining gender
identities is evident in a news item entitled 'No long hair for Sahiwal
boys', which reported that the District Administration in Sahiwal had
decided to launch a campaign against young men with long hair and
earrings. The City Magistrate started a campaign in which he took barbers
with him to give haircuts to any offending boys and remove their earrings
on the spot. This is a telling example of the State's nationalist anxiety
manifesting itself in the possible loss of masculinity -- if we don't have
'masculine' men, our nation will be weakened. It is through a consistent reinforcement of
the imagery of power, masculinity, strength, blood, death and war, that a
masculine and powerful nation is evoked. Along with the imagery of strong
and brave men, a concomitant imagery of weak women/mothers in need of
protection, is maintained. In order to buttress this imagery further, a
permanent sense of threat and impending doom is maintained by means of the
myth that India wants to devour Pakistan as it never accepted its
existence.
An important part of nationalism in S. Asia
has been the way women and their sexuality are treated as the symbol of
culture, tradition and home. In a situation of national conflict this
leads to the women of the enemy being forced into a similar symbolic role.
This is why while violence during communal, ethnic and international
conflicts is directed against everyone, women are violated in a
sexually-specific way, that is, they are raped. Not only are they raped,
their bodies are marked in particular ways that are meant as reminders of
their being women, the honour of the community/nation. The use of women in this way marked the
moment of independence for India and Pakistan. The most horrifying tales
of torture and insane violence during the Partition of 1947 have been
recorded by writers like Saadat Hasan Manto in stories like Thanda Gosht
(Frozen Flesh) and Siyah Hashiyeh (Black Frames). Similarly, Krishan
Chandar in his story Ghaddar (Traitor), recorded the specific kinds of
sexual violence against women of opposing communities. There are terrible
instances of this in the more recent history of Pakistan. According to one
estimate, the Pakistan army raped two hundred thousand women during the
army action in East Pakistan in 1970. Writing on the Partition of 1947, Veena Das
comments that widespread violence against women of all religious
communities was witnessed with more than hundred thousand women having
been abducted from each of the two parts of Punjab alone. She argues that
"the bodies of women became political signs, territories on which the
political programmes of the rioting communities of men were
inscribed." In her view, the desire to assert collective identity,
whether of nation or of community, becomes transformed into "the
desire to humiliate the men of other nations and communities through the
violent appropriation of 'their' women." Women's own identities are
transformed and subsumed in this process of state-formation and
nation-building. In their analysis of communal sexual
violence during the Partition of India, and more recently in Bosnia, Ritu
Menon and Kamla Bhasin find there are three specific features of the
crimes against women, namely their brutality, their extreme sexual
violence, and their collective nature. The
range of explicit sexual violation includes "stripping; parading
naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and
genitalia with triumphal slogans [including the phrases 'Pakistan Zindabad!'
and 'Jai Hind!'; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of
course; killing foetuses." Furthermore,
violent sexual crimes were often committed against women of other
communities in public places, such as the marketplace, usually in the
presence of their male kin. Given the symbolic role of women, the
desecration of women becomes a matter of national shame and
cultural/religious dishonour and must be avenged.
Menon and Bhasin note that "one rumour guaranteed to
provoke communal violence and reprisal during Partition, was that of
large-scale raping of a community's women." Thus,
just as the nation is narrated on women's bodies, the enemy inscribes its
victory on the female body. The
ultimate defeat that can be inflicted on the enemy is the pollution of its
race through collective rape during war and other forms of conflict. Women's
dishonour is the dishonour of the race, the nation and the country. It is
the ultimate form of defiling, the defiling of one's mother. It
is interesting to note that since so much emotion is evinced through the
imagery of the mother, most forms of Punjabi abuse centre around the
defiling of the mother, sister or daughter. This
is usually considered the ultimate insult to be avenged with physical
violence. Menon and Bhasin quote Stasa Zajovic about
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia: "when 'their' women are raped, it is
experienced not as, and through, the women's pain, but as a male defeat:
they were too feeble to protect their property." Menon and Bhasin
conclude that the failure to protect women-as-property reflects on a man's
masculinity -- and, by extension, his community's honour. This is one
reason why, in communal violence, a whole collectivity is involved. Women's bodies are treated as territories
to be conquered, claimed or marked by the assailant The
fact that so much of communal sexual violence took place in temples or
gurudawaras means that it was the simultaneous violation of women and
sacred space. As Menon and
Bhasin assert, "In the context of Partition, it engraved the
permanence of the division of India into India and Pakistan on the women
of both religious communities, in the way that they became the respective
countries, indelibly imprinted by the Other." For Menon and Bhasin, then, the marking of
the breasts and genitalia made permanent the sexual appropriation of the
woman. This enabled the
enemies to pollute the "biological national source of the
family". In this way, women's reproductive power was appropriated to
prevent the undesirable proliferation of the enemy's progeny. Thus,
the female body itself could be made to appear as a traitor. Such violence constituted the "profaning of everything
that was held to be of sacred and symbolic value to the Other." It is clear that wherever identity and self are threatened by an other, an outsider defined as an enemy, women's bodies become the arena of the most violent forms of conflict. As global conflicts intensify, and males of weak and dependent countries feel threatened by global powers, the notion of women's bodies as signifiers of nation, home, and honour is likely to increase. This increase can potentially manifest itself as nationalist anxiety and the response is most likely going to be further incarceration of women, greater emphasis on the veil and the chardivari, an enhanced desire to confine women to domestic tasks and motherhood. This is likely to be accompanied by an intensified glorification of motherhood and a more urgent need to protect motherhood against violation and impurity, even while increasing women's participation in the market due to economic imperatives. The double burden is, therefore, likely to increase along with the controls imposed on women's bodies. Women's bodies will not merely be the site of political, national and armed struggles; they will also become the major signifiers in economic struggles and market conflicts. We were unable to contact the author, if
anyone knows how to contact her, please let us know. Thanks.
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