Postcolonial Feminist Identity Versus Communal Identity

Glory E. Dharmaraj

I seek to examine a set of interrelated  concepts, namely hybridity and identity.   I also aim to explore how they can be utilized positively in a cultural space contested by divisive interplay of caste, religion and communally- defined identity politics.
Space and identity are closely linked in colonialist and postcolonial discourses.  In colonialist discourse, the Orient is constructed in relation to the Occident.  The East exists as a constructed body in opposition to the West. The space where such identities are constructed is criss-crossed and hybridized.
Postcolonial writers like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Gyan Prakash, Musa Dube, Kwok Pui-Lan, to name a few, have identified the complexities and problematics of the contested space where the colonialist has inscribed the identity of the colonized from the vantage point of imperialist gaze.  The writers have also reiterated, through various strategies, that the space of the inscribed identity is where the postcolonial critic has to recover the muted voices, stifled differences, and multiple identities.
For Dube, this space is the colonialist, ‘conversion space’ where institutions of church, public administration, schools, language and trade have left their dominant narratives and structures.E1  The identities formed in these places in the colonized lands are not essentialist.  On the other hand, they are displaced, relocated, and interrupted identities.  Colonialism itself is an interruption.  The impact of it has severely disrupted the subjecthood of the colonized relegating them to the status of objects.

One of the postcolonial tasks is to enable the colonized to recover subjecthood and be agents of transformation.  For that, a significant strategy is not to see identities as essentialist.  Edward Said invites postcolonialists to see colonialist/colonized identities as “contrapuntal ensembles,” a composite identity which is the result of the colonizer acting on the colonized groups.E2  Said’s suggested strategy in his works is to examine both the dominant and subordinate voices in the same contested space. 
Further, Homi Bhabha popularised the word “hybridity” in his book, The Location of Culture.  He too emphasizes the need to see the dynamic of the colonizer and the colonized as a two-way process.   The oppressor seeks to eliminate the differences and the voices of the suppressed, and the oppressed internalised the servitude.  But the oppressed have found a way to ‘survive’ even under multilayered oppressions of political, economic, cultural and religious dominations (171-191).  It is this space of hybridity which can be a place of survival, retrieval, and renegotiation.
Dube seeks to locate ‘hybrid spaces’ as decolonising spaces too.  She affirms these spaces and calls for feminist enterprise to take place in these spaces in the native culture. She wants the postcolonial feminists to make ‘room’ in order to ‘reinterpret the old, promote the good, and imagine the new’ in these spaces.E3   For R.S. Sugirtharaj, hybrid spaces are places where meanings are renegotiated and identities redrawn, by “imaginatively reploying the local and the imported elements.”E4

The hybrid spaces can be found wherever structural dominations of political, economic, cultural, sexual and other forms of forces exercise their rule over the others, and continue to construct the other as an opposite. Sites of globalization can also be investigated in order to locate spaces of hybridity and engage in postcolonial feminist strategies.
Hybrid spaces are places where self and the other exist in an internecine fight. Pui-Lan alludes to a “posture of a fighting literature.”E5  For Gayatri Spivak, an earliest postcolonial feminist critic, this is the place where the intellectual needs to speak for the muted subaltern caught in the web of “epistemic violence” of text and culture.E6  In “French feminism in an international frame,” Spivak exposes how epistemic violence is the production of an arrogating, all-knowing subject setting out to gather objective and authoritarian knowledge.E7
In light of such postcolonial mapping of space and identity, Christian mission also needs to be examined in the hybrid spaces.  Investigative strategies need to expose the dominant voice and unearth the suppressed voices simultaneously.  Said comes up with the notion of “reading contrapuntally.”  He says,
In the counterpoint of Western music, various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle.E8

In order to read the mission narrative contrapuntally, one needs to juxtapose traditional mission paradigms with the current changing concepts of mission.  Traditional mission is known for sending missionaries, being engaged in conversion and serving as civilizing agencies.  In short, sending is the old paradigm of mission.   It is a one way sending, from the West to the East.

Dube calls the sites of receiving mission as ‘conversion spaces.’E9  Traditional mission always posited an other in need of civilizing influences based on dominant models.  Political colonization went hand in hand with cultural colonization and religious colonization.
The results are the current disenchantment with even the word ‘missionary’ and the fear of being called racist in global conversations on mission and ministry. Traditional mission conjures up images of boarding schools, forced English language learning, imposition of Western habits and thought patterns.  This triumphalist, colonialist, and expansionist enterprise has been examined and exposed by many postcolonial writers. Though acts of restitution and official statements of repentance have been made, to some extent, by mission leaders, holistic relations have not been fully restored between the former colonizers and the colonized in mission. Suspicion on  both sides exists.
Christian mission, therefore, has to critically examine what the goal of mission is in the present context and articulate it without any ambiguity. In summarizing a report from a theological roundtable sponsored by the Christian Conference of Asia and the Council for World Mission, Philip Wickeri asks,  “Is mission accomplished when our neighbor becomes a Christian, or when he or she experiences healing, wholeness, renewal, or transformation?”E10
I would like to refer to a lament of a Muslim woman who is still undergoing the adverse impact of the horrible events of the killing of Muslims in Gujarat. At the wake of this massacre of Muslims by the extremist Hindus in February-March of 2002 in Gujarat, Muslim women in that area, in particular live in fear. Their lament is  captured in one of our leading newspapers.  A reporter reports the lament of a nameless Muslim woman from that area in The Hindu December 28, 2003.   The paper states, “Fear is today the dominant emotion in the lives of the Gujarati Muslims.”  It goes on to say,

For women the fear of physical violence is heightened by fear of sexual attacks. Having been subjected to sexual violence themselves, having seen other women from the community being violated, or knowing the extent to which sexual crimes were committed endangered a psychological threat perception among all women from the community.E11

A woman survivor from Anand, Gujarat told the reporters that nobody has asked for “forgiveness or shown regret.”  A lament that nobody has even shown regret is a challenge to the feminist hermeneutics.
Another reported piece of information that I would like to lift up is a picture which appeared in The Times of India on January 19, 2004.   The title of the picture is ‘A Sad tale scripted by terrorists.’  It showed the picture of an older Sikh woman, Simranjeet Kaur, with two of her children chained to a tree in their home.  The comment of the reporter said:

Simaranjeet Kaur has kept her son Gurasaheb Singh and daughter Kudeep
Kaur chained to a tree at their home at Bainika Blair village, 40 km from
Amritsar, for the past 12 years.  They lost their mental balance in 1991 their
father being shot dead by terrorists.  Simranjeet Kaur says she is unable to
afford treatment of her children.E12

This is another lament. A womanist lament.  A woman crying for her family.  What the Indian landscape has seen in the recent years is the resurgence of communal identity.  It  is dangerously manipulated by the ideology of Hindutva.   Such an identity fosters negation of the others; constructs religious minorities as others and it seeks to homogenize differences.

Gabriele Dietrich rightly points out that the “brunt of communal violence has been borne by minority women (Sikhs 1984, Muslims after Ayodhya).”  She also pinpoints a tragic prioritizing in women’s consciousness, when it comes to crises and communal riots.  Unfortunately, after the incident of the destruction of a Muslim mosque, Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, India on December 6, 1992, a large number of women got  “coopted into communal and fundamentalist mentalities and interventions.”E13  Women choose to prioritise their communal identities above their identity  as women.
A question then is whether to give up women as a category of analysis? Many feminists like Jane Freedman, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Letty Russell, among many others, have cautioned against essentializing identities whether it be communal or feminist.  Freedman suggests the notion of ‘transversal politics’ proposed by Nira Yuval-Davis.E14   The latter places dialogue as an important component which could replace perceived unity and homogeneity.  In this, care is taken to see that, “identities do not become fixed and unchanging.” But Freedman reiterates Yuval-Davis saying that  recognition is given to the specific positionings of those who participate in them as well as to the ‘unfinished knowledge that each such situated positioning can offer.’  In such an endeavor, while differences are affirmed, common objectives are prioritized for liberation and justice. This provides a group identity.E15
The call of the hour is to recognize death over life and act in coalition in order to lift up the latter.  Life over death.  It is imperative that we need to recognize  negative, death-dealing identities often being preferred to life-giving, life-affirming identities in the hybrid spaces.  Hybrid spaces could be abused for freezing identities.  Fossilized identities are death-dealing identities.  They could be used to substitute one master for the other; here the Hindu extremist for the colonialist ruler. Rudolf Heredia says, “A negative identity is delineated against others by what it is not. Such identities become closed and exclusive.”E16  Letty Russell advocates resisting essentializing difference and claiming “liberative difference” as keys to transformation.E17

Women have taken up the task of bringing communal injustices despite odds.  The International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat has done a feminist analysis called, “Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the genocide in Gujarat” released it on December 24, 2003.  It argues that the genocide that took place in Gujarat is to be placed in the larger global context of attacks on Muslim after September 2001 terrorist attacks and the global war against terrorism by the U.S and its allies.  At the core of this feminist analysis is a call for the international community to understand the, “genocidal nature of the Hindutva project” and to “investigate and prosecute” organizations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Bharatiya Janata Party, Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena and individuals who were responsible for propagating hate speeches and actions.E18
Further, Evangeline Anderson-Rajkumar has written a feminist analysis of the incident in  In God’s Image.E19  She compares the incident of the killing of a pregnant Muslim woman with the racist killings in the U.S in the past, and draws parallels between them and the Christ experience of crucifixion.  Therefore, the Muslim’s lament is not yet completely lost.  Women have taken up, though the minority women in the stories mentioned do not have the knowledge of solidarity coming through to them. Long nights of waiting and wailing are their lonely lot, at this point.
In what seems to be a long night of bewailing, transformational clues are found in these feminist enterprises.  In ethnic conflicts based on narrow religious interpretations of texts, there is a hard and arduous task ahead of us to interpret and live out positive and peace-giving traditions.  For Rosemary Radford Ruether, transformational clues are found in a feminist enterprise which builds what she calls a ‘correlation’ between its own critical principles and the prophetic-messianic tradition in the Christian scripture.E20
The same can be stretched positively to speak about interfaith relations also. Positive, life-giving traditions in any scripture should be used to evoke the best instincts of peace and non-violence in communities.
At the height of colonial rule in India, Gandhi resorted to this method as it is outlined in powerful way in The Speaking Tree by Richard Lannoy. Though Gandhi’s base of spirituality came basically from Hindu scriptures, he was open to incorporating other scriptural truths of the cause of peace and non-violence. Though the Hindu scripture, Gita, is a warrior epic and extols war, Gandhi reread it. In his copy of the book, he wrote that Aperfect renunciation@ was impossible without Aperfect observance of ahimsa (non-violence) in every shape and form.E21
Gandhi felt the future pulse of India when he laid out this rereading. Years after Gandhi’s concepts of ahimsa were seemingly ignored in India, when Salman Rushdie projected a repressive India, Times of India said,

No, dear Rushdie, we do not wish to build a repressive India. On the contrary, we are doing our best to build a liberal India, where we can all  breathe freely.  But in order to build this India, we have to preserve the India that exists. That may not be a pretty India, but it’s the only India we have.
(Appignanesi & Maitland 1990).E22 

The dilemma today, more than ever, is to confront again the question of what to preserve and what regressive elements to abandon. Is this the only India we have? Are there other Indias, more liberal visions of India waiting to be released from the minds and souls of her children, broad-minded majority children as well as her often fear-filled minority children?

For the Christian feminists, the life-giving tradition is the prophetic-messianic way that leads to the Good News of the gospel.  Mission in any other way could be dangerous and triumphalist.  An alternative vision the Bible offers is found in Revelation 21:22-24, 22:1-2.  This is an apocalyptic vision of John.  He sees a New Heaven and a New Earth in the form of a city.  The city itself offers hybridity.  There is a throne, a symbol of colonialism, hierarchy. But it is the throne of God and the Lamb, symbols and models of power sharing.  The throne is tempered by the Lamb in this hybrid space.
The Lamb itself is a symbol of brokeness.  An animal of sacrifice, it evokes the passion of Christ who was led like a lamb to the slaughter, as foretold in Isaiah 53: 7.  As a broken body, the Lamb’s vulnerability is akin to the vulnerability of a  Dalit whose name means ‘broken.’ But the Lamb is also a symbol of victory over oppression, life over death. A Paschal mystery the faith community celebrates as the Body of Christ.
Further, there is no temple in the city.  The temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. Awesomeness evoked by the presence of the sovereign might of God is juxtaposed by the brokenness embodied in the figure of the Lamb.  The Lamb is a symbol of suffering Christianity, as distinct from the triumphalist Christianity practised by the colonialist.
The Lamb stands there as a redemptive means, a decolonizing self, taking on the burden of bearing the sins of the world.  Behold the Lamb that takes away the sins of triumphalist practices of Christianity, and who restores healing and wholesomeness to the Body of Christ which has become a contested hybrid space. Taking on liberating differences and abandoning essentializing differences in the Body of Christ is the call of the hour.

A postcolonial feminist task is to locate the difference between truimphalist church and the suffering church in the Body of Christ, and work on the strategy of liberating difference which constantly challenges both essentialized differences and fossilized differences.  The symbol of the Lamb as the lamp of the temple is a key image in this context.  Light exposes and reveals.  Searching light of mission today is to locate these crucial liberating differences and work on the life-giving elements released by them.
The text also offers another powerful symbol.  The River of Life flowing, connecting and healing nations and peoples.  The River flows right through the middle of the city.  The metropolis is redeemed by the flowing waters.  The peripheries, the nations located on the banks of the River, are also redeemed by the healing property of the leaves of the Tree.
Both the metropolis and the periphery need healing.  They exist in close relations in a global hybrid space.  They need healing throughout the year.  Hence the perennial River and the fruits for every month.  Different fruits, twelve in number, offer healing.  These are gifts from God’s Common to the entire humanity. Life-giving differences are affirmed in this stately scene of metropolis and periphery coming together.  The intertwined symbols of the River and the Tree, healing leaves and waiting nations, attest to that. The bountiful God sheds God’s presence and blesses the landscape. 
Fossilized identities need to be redeemed. Essentialized identities need to be healed. Healing and wholeness as mission need to flow within and without the church. Christ as a healing presence, restorer of relationships, bringer of wholesomeness and redeemer of God’s image in each of us brings about relevant mission in today’s context.
It is not easy to break colonialist paradigms.  But healing streams are bound to flow within the church and outside the church.  That is the ultimate vision for the church and the world.  The River of Life will continue to flow and break open new boundaries. Metropolis as well as peripheries will be brought together as part of God’s bountiful Commons for the common good of everyone.  It is a gift. God’s love flowing through us all, for all as a life-giving river.  It is the hidden river of messianic and prophetic opposition, now gushing forth and saving peoples from oppressions, national and international.  It is the River of Life healing the banks, borders, islands and mainland. It is the closing and ultimate vision for man, woman, child, youth, and creation to which Christian feminist enterprise commits itself as a tool and a change agent.