Description
The sartorial choice of Islamic veiling is a repository of bodily practice. It manifests the performative identities of Muslim women— signified by the meanings surrounding ‘veiling’ the category of Muslim women is produced and reinforced reiteratively. While ‘veiling’ per se is not merely Islamic, due to the politicisation of Islamic veiling in India as a marker of the Islamic identity, it is perceived to be the ‘other’. Though the undercurrent of Islamophobic sentiments in post-colonial India is rooted in the country’s colonial baggage and partition history, the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) ascent to power in 2014 as the Hindutva ideological right wing has added fuel to the existing vilification of Islamic veiling. Firstly, how does the modernist post-colonial nation-building set the ‘secular’ precedent in strengthening the orientalist veiling discourse? Secondly, amidst the Indian hijab row, how do we locate the concept of ‘secular’ in the Indian discourse? Nationalised modernisation and secularisation— these two modernist prongs in post-colonial India discursively formed the Indian ‘secular’. Alongside, the paper mulls over 25 field-based responses of Muslim women from various parts of the country to identify the overt and covert forms of prevalent hijabophobia. Hijabophobia, an extension of Islamophobia, is based on the visible marker of veil-cladding Muslim women’s identity and exudes a violent political disposition against Muslimness. It works as a double-edged sword in shaping the lives of Muslim women and restricting their choices in constricted political environments. Re-framing the Indian ‘secular’ with feminist interjection, the paper argues that women’s lived experiences are shaped by the violence of a Hindu gaze (an Indian concoction of colonial and male gazes)— stemming not only from the country’s hypermasculine governmental disposition against the choices of minority women but also from women’s communal interaction with the numerical Hindu majority.
