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From village religion to global networks: Women, religious nationalism andsustainability in South and Southeast Asia

Most of the articles in this special issue derive from an

international workshop organised in Delhi in November 2007

by Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel around the theme of

women, religion and sustainability in South and SoutheastAsia.1 The background to this workshop was the striking

increase in politicised religion or religious nationalism (to

use Peter van der Veer's term, van der Veer, 1994) in recent

years in South and Southeast Asia, as in other parts of the

world. Women have been central to this movement in many

respects. Since female behaviour (modesty, chastity, etc.) has

often been a key signifier and boundary marker for these

new movements, it is women who have been expected to

modify their behaviour in conformity to the new prescription.

Women have often been the objects of attack for failing to

conform, but women too have in many cases been key

supporters of the new movements. At the same time,

globalisation and development activities have opened upnew employment opportunities for women, often incompat-

ible with the demands of participation in the new religious

movements.

Religion can be a divisive and destructive force in

contemporary South Asia, as elsewhere in today's world.

South Asia's religious traditions Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist,

Christian have provided a basis for destructive forms of

communal identification, have encouraged hostility towards

outsiders and in extreme cases have justified violence against

members of other communities. All the major South Asian

religions have also been used to support oppressive and

discriminatory attitudes to women. Yet religion in South

Asia covers a wide range of complex institutions and forms ofbehaviour, and to regard them all as always necessarily

negative and destructive would be a gross oversimplification.

It would also be self-defeating, since religion will undoubt-

edly continue to be a major aspect of all South Asian societies

for the foreseeable future. We need a more nuanced and

sensitive approach to South Asian religious life, one which can

encompass both positive and negative components, and we

hope that this collection will be a stepping-stone towards

achieving this.

A particular concern for the workshop, as for the project

that gave rise to it, was to understand what happens to those

aspects oftraditional religious behaviour that can be seen as

positive, life-supporting and linked to human and environ-mental sustainability in the face of these new critiques. What,

too, happens to the linkages between women of different

communities now that new politicised religious identities

drive women towards identification with purer forms of

religion, untainted by association with the other religious

community? For example, various women's rituals at wed-

dings and births, traditionally common to all religious groups,

are now banned by newIslamic movements, who argue these

are superstitions and associated with Hinduism. While there

have been a number of studies of the negative impact of new

forms of Islam and Hinduism, in particular for South Asia,

there has been less attention to what may have been of value

in the older forms, and how much of this may have surviveddespite the pressure to reject forms and practices associated

with the other community.

We also wanted to bring together a substantial body of

material on Bangladesh, since much of the anthropological

literature on Bangladesh, perhaps reflecting the strong

regional focus on development issues, tends to treat religion

in relatively simplistic and reductionist terms. We feel that if

we are to understand the part that religion is playing in

women's lives, and how this may affect the present and future

development of a societysuch as Bangladesh, then it is vital to

see religion as meaningful and significant for Bangladeshi

women.

Bangladesh has its own regional specificity, but many ofthe issues that are significant for Bangladesh also recur in the

wider South and Southeast Asian context, so we also included

a number of comparative papers in the workshop. Our

original intention had been to include several papers from

Southeast Asia, but in the event only one speaker on

Southeast Asia (Maila Stivens) was able to attend. After the

workshop, we invited three further Southeast Asian specia-

lists (Mary Ida Bagus, Rachel Rinaldo, and Minako Sakai) to

contribute to provide further coverage of this region.

Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 301304

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The collection begins with six papers on Bangladesh.

Shelley Feldman's Shame and Honour: The Violence of

Gendered Norms under conditions of Global Crisis introduces

the Bangladesh section, since its focus on moral regulation

as part of the Bangladeshi state provides an important ana-

lytic tool to understand both the situation of women in

Bangladesh, and the apparent reluctance or inability of the

state, despite its relatively democratic nature and pressure

from international organisations, to act to defend women

effectively against violence. Feldman points to the expansion

of religious education, the progressive marketisation and

privatisation of the rural economy, and the stress on reduc-

ing women's fertility as factors that have revitalised and

reinforced the already existing discourse on honour and

shame, reshaping the decisions and alternatives open to

women. Referring to the work of Philip Corrigan (Corrigan,

1981; Corrigan & Sayer, 1985), she notes that moral

regulation is an intrinsic part of any state project. In

Bangladesh, civil, religious and customary practice have

become conflated, leaving women in situations of domestic

violence or social ostracism with few alternatives. In such a

context, women's suicide may represent a conscious choice

when faced by a life of fear, ostracism, and harassment,

conditions which undermine women's everyday sociation

and security.

Ainoon Naher's article examines, on the basis of her field

research from the 1990s, one of the principal manifestations

of Islamist2 activity in rural Bangladesh in recent years. This is

hostility to Western-funded development activity and spe-

cifically to the participation of rural women in NGO activities,

which has regularly been portrayed as transgressing Bangla-

deshi norms for female behaviour. Naher shows how these

campaigns make sense in the rural context, where they are

able to exploit both the destabilisation of the local power

structure through NGO activities, and a range of fears and

misunderstandings among the rural masses. She also exam-

ines a variety of ways in which women have resisted and

subverted the campaigns.

Naseem Hussain's contribution, on religion, gender and

identity politics, focuses more on the urban context, and asks

why urban women have increasingly become involved in

Islamist movements and have adopted the practice of veiling,

previously uncommon in Bangladeshi society. She asks

whether this is an indication of a specifically Islamic

modernity, and whether involvement in these movements

can lead to positive opportunities for women. Like Feldman,

she stresses the expansion of Islamic education. She also

points to the involvement of Islamist movements in building

up a modern economic base for its followers, the skilful use of

press and mass media, and the increasing presence of Islamic

NGOs with Middle Eastern funding. The Tabligh-i Jama'at, a

well-known international Islamic organisation with a large

membership in Bangladesh, provides rural and urban women

with opportunities to socialise, travel, and learn about Islam,

while Islamic study or tafsirgroups in urban neighbourhoods

provide valued facilities for socialisation and recreation, as

well as acquiring both Islamic knowledge and useful secular

skills. However, while these activities may provide women

with some scope for developing critical perspectives on

traditional forms of Bangladeshi Islam, they all take forgranted a wider acceptance of the patriarchal order.

Sarah White's article is also concerned with the new

emergence of women as religious subjects, providing a

valuable discussion of the politics of scholarship about Islam

and women's empowerment, both in general and in relation

to Bangladesh. She cautions however against globalising

explanations, using two case studies to demonstrate how

Islamic piety can manifest in very different ways. Amma

Huzur is a Tabligh-i Jama'at activist who identifies with the

Tabligh's campaign to purify village culture of its supposed

Hindu tendencies, while Afsana Begum, like Amma Huzur

respected for her Islamic piety, argues for greater female

autonomy and for harmony between Muslims and Hindus.

White notes how the Tabligh-i Jama'at, although non-political

in orientation, in practice can lay the groundwork to be

exploited by radical Islamic political parties such as Jama'at-i

Islami. She suggests in conclusion that women's empower-

ment should be analysed in relation to the social and political

context in which it takes place, and to the patterns of

enablement and exclusion it generates.

Returning to the opening theme of the difficult choices

faced by women, Thrse Blanchet's article looks at another

situation in which women have had to make hard decisions,

that of labour migration from villages in Western Bangladesh

for bar work in Mumbai. Blanchet has stressed here and

elsewhere that, despite official concerns about lost girls and

trafficked women, women's bar work and sex work should

not be seen exclusively in negative terms. It has provided

some women with options for personal advancement and

empowerment closed to them in the village context, and was

treated with a degree ofde facto toleration during the difficult

times of the 1970s and 1980s, when the women's financial

contributions were vital to the community. The returned bar

workers do not always submit to the village authorities'

attempts to re-establish the moral order, for example by

subjecting them to purificatory rituals. Nevertheless, the

personal cost paid by these women can be high: border

crossings are not easy matters.

The last of the six papers on Bangladesh is our own, on

gender, religious change and sustainability. Here we examine

the relationship between village religion, particularly women's

religious life, and the sustainability of the village community,

buildingon a number of studies of what have been called rituals

of auspiciousness in the Hindu context. We argue that these

practices, with their close connection to agriculture, childbirth,

good fortune and everyday success, which are widespread

among Muslims and Catholics in Bangladesh as well as among

Hindus, can be better seen as concerned with issues of

sustainability, with the production and reproduction of the

village community through time. They provide contexts for

sociality across formal religious boundaries, emphasising

women's common engagement in themaintenanceof everyday

life. This important sector of village religious and cultural

activities is opposed by international Islamist movements such

as the Tabligh-i Jama'at, whose initial raison d'tre was the

purification of such non-Muslim practices (Mayaram, 1997).

We suggest that the Islamist critique, though frequently

encountered, has not yet succeeded in breaking down the

cultural foundations of these practices. Can they provide a

significant resource to resist the globalising tendencies of

international Islam andrecreatea sense of local commitment tothe sustainability of the village community?

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The issues raised in these six papers on Bangladesh recur

in the seven remaining papers in our collection, three of

which relate to South Asia (Pakistan and India) and four to

Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia).

They are refracted through the different local cultural and

religious contexts of these various societies, providing a range

of illuminating parallels and comparisons. Rowena Robin-

son's article, on India, takes up a theme of Feldman's and

Blanchet's contributions, of women forced to make difficult

choices in circumstances not of their own making. Robinson's

paper deals with the aftermath of anti-Muslim violence in

Mumbai and Gujarat, and presents the voices of a number of

Muslim women in each case. She explores how these women

have coped with the impact of the violence of the Hindu Right

and the consequent erosion of their security and life-

opportunities, but also to the problematic responses of the

male leadership of their Muslim communities. She argues

that the women have distanced themselves from both state

and community, while making tentative moves to build up

links with Muslim community organisations.

If Muslim women in Gujarat and Mumbai have had to face

an unsympathetic and hostile state dominated by the Hindu

right, women and men in Pakistan are increasingly faced by a

society in which the process of building a modern state has

been, in Pnina Werbner's words, erratic and incomplete,

and where Islam is as much a cause of division as unity. Her

contribution, focussing on women's pilgrimage to the Sufi

shrine of Ghamkol Sharif extends the discussion in Rozario

and Samuel's article of the role of Christian and Muslim saints'

shrines in Bangladesh. Werbner argues that Sufi orders, while

avoiding the rhetorics of nationalism and of the global Islamic

community, nevertheless build up, in contexts such as

pilgrimage, the moral relationships between strangers from

different regional, ethnic and class backgrounds which are the

essential preconditions of nationhood. Women, despite the

restrictions of their everyday lives, play a full part in this

inclusive, peaceful civic culture based on sharing, communi-

cation and respect.

The third South Asian paper, by Navtej Purewal and

Virinder Kalra, presents material from both India and

Pakistan, deriving from work in areas of the Punjab on both

sides of the IndiaPakistan border. Their argument again

connects with the themes of Rozario and Samuel's paper,

looking at women's popular religious practices as both central

to religious life and as cutting across boundaries between

official religious communities (here Sikh, Muslim and Hindu).

Their main examples are the Teean festival in East (Indian)

Punjab and women's shrine practices in West (Pakistani)

Punjab. Purewal and Kalra rightly point to the problematic

nature of the concept of popular practices, a term which

tends to go along with a dismissal of much of women's

religious practice as cultural rather than religious. In reality

this vernacular Punjabi religion continues to exist on both

sides of the border, and provides the possibility of a less

monolithic and divisive understanding of religious identity

and belonging.

The first of our Southeast Asian articles, by Maila Stivens,

brings us back to issuesraised in Shelley Feldman's and Naseem

Hussain's contributions, concerning the state as a moral project.

Stivens analyses the celebrated custody dispute concerningMaria Hertogh, a Dutch girl raised by a Muslim Malay woman,

whichled to18 peoplebeing killed in street riots inSingapore in

December 1950, and a series of subsequent Malaysian custody

cases, as arenas for contests about the status of religion and

nationality within Singapore and Malaysia. While alerting us to

the complexity of Islam in Malaysia, she argues for the

importance of family, marriage and the custody of children

for the mutually entangled processes of religious and national

boundary-making.

The last three articles are all based on field research in

Indonesia, and take up some of the issues discussed in Naseem

Hussain's and Sarah White's articles about the individual

consequences of Islamic piety for women. Mary Ida Bagus

looks at the intensification of HinduBalinese religious and

cultural identity in the aftermath of the October 2002 terrorist

bombings in Bali. Ajeg Bali, an indigenous movement to

promote an exclusionary and intolerant HinduBalinese reli-

gious identity, has met with mixed reactions among Balinese.

Ajeg Bali has opened up some new possibilities for women, for

example through the new forms of sociality constituted by

travelling singing-groups (persantian). In general, though, its

impact on women is problematic, since it endorses the

conservative and patriarchal Balinese adat (traditional law) at

the expense of national law, which gives women more

protection. Ajeg Bali has nevertheless created a climate of

religious nationalism to which Balinese women have to

respond and in terms of which they have to frame their

personal strategies, and Ida Bagus presents a number of case

studies to illustrate how this works in practice.

Minako Sakai looks at the impact of emergent Islamic

finance on female traders in Central Java. The establishment of

Islamic banking in Indonesia in the early 1990s has been

followed by the development of a new sector of cooperative

Islamic finance institutions (Baitul Maal wat Tamwil, or BMT)

with strong support from Islamic civil organisations. There

were believed to be around 3200 of these by 2006, mostly

providing microfinance-type loans, though in some cases

competing with normal banking services. Sakai examines one

of the larger BMTs, which was set up with aims of poverty-

alleviation and social justice in urban Yogyakarta, in some

detail. As with other BMTs, the organisation combines a

charitable organisation (baitul maal) providing a health clinic,

scholarships and microcredit with a savings and finance

scheme (baitut tamwil). The latter also incorporates activities

to promote Islamic solidarity and social justice. The baitut

tamwil also has a scheme to support Indonesian female migrant

workers. While the organisation as a whole is not explicitly

directed to women, in practice it has mostly benefited female

workers without access to the formal banking sector.

Rachel Rinaldo's article, based on fieldwork with women

in Jakarta, looks at the consequences of the global Islamic

revival for women's political subjectivity. She contrasts the

women in Rahima, a Muslim women's rights NGO, and in the

PKS, an Islamic political party. Both groups are enthusiastic

and committed Muslims, for the most part from well-

educated middle-class backgrounds. However, the Rahima

members' conception of piety is centred around action for

social justice, whereas PKS members are working for a state

that will promote and implement Islamic values such as

proper female behaviour and comportment. Rinaldo places

the PKS in the context of both the heavy governmentrestrictions on political action in Indonesia in the 1980s,

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under which religious groups provided a relatively safe

context for political activity, and the social and career

opportunities which Muslim organisations such as the PKS

offer to their members (particularly female members) today.

Rinaldo suggests that Rahima and PKS represent distinct

Muslim political subjectivities, influenced by global dis-

courses of religion and feminism, seeking to reshape state

and society, and reflect conflicting positions within global

Islam.

As the articles in this special issue show, South and

Southeast Asian societies today are complex environments,

constituted by local histories and cultural practices as well as

by global intellectual, political and religious movements. They

offer a variety of possibilities for women from different social,

ethnic and economic backgrounds. For some women, options

are harsh and limited. For others, new religious movements

may offer the chance of education, social mobility and the

effective deployment of personal agency. For the most part,

though, patriarchal authority remains firmly in place, while

the new religious movements undermine traditional linkages

between members of different religious communities, erect-

ing in their place new forms of sociality which act to exclude

as much as to include. Whether these divisive forces can be

countered by a growing awareness of our common humanity

and our common interests in a just and sustainable society

remains to be seen. We believe that the articles presented

here provide, at the very least, an illuminating insight into the

present state of affairs.

Endnotes

1 The workshop was part of an Australian Research Council-funded project(Muslims and Christians: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainabilityin the Asia Pacific Region) on which Rozario and Samuel have been working

since 2005.

2 The term Islamist has been used in a variety of ways in the literature,with some authors (e.g. ) making a systematic distinction between Islamistmovements (e.g. Jama'at-i Islami) aimed at political transformation andneofundamentalist movements (e.g. Tabligh-i Jama'at) aimed at personalpiety. In these papers it is used as a general term for contemporary Islamicrevival movements with a socially and religiously conservative orientation,including both of Roy's categories.

References

Corrigan, Philip (1981). On moral regulation: Some preliminary remarks.Sociological Review, 29, 313337.

Corrigan, Philip, & Sayer, Derek (1985). Introduction. The Great Arch: EnglishState Formation As Cultural Revolution (pp. 113). London: BasilBlackwell.

Mayaram, Shail (1997). Resisting regimes: Myth, memory and the shaping of aMuslim identity. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Roy, Olivier (2002). Globalised Islam: The search for a New Ummah. London:Hurst and Co.

Van der Veer, Peter (1994). Religious nationalism: Hindus and Muslims inIndia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geoffrey Samuel

Santi Rozario

School of Religious and Theological Studies,

Cardiff University, UKCorresponding author. School of Religious and Theological

Studies, Cardiff University, Humanities Building, Colum Road,

Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.

304 From village religion to global networks: Women, religious nationalism and sustainability in South and Southeast Asia