This is not merely a verse; it symbolises the pain of the dying culture of the tawa'if. Etymologically, tawa'if is the plural of the Arabic word taifa, meaning ‘band’ or ‘group’ but the word tawa'if, used as a singular in Urdu, means ‘prostitute’. The common and derogatory word for prostitute in Urdu is ‘randi’. There are different types of tawa’ifs: those who were ‘kept’ on a permanent basis by a man and might eventually have married him, and those who led an itinerant life, moving from city to city. In some cities, especially Lucknow, the tawa’if occupied a relatively respectable position in society and was admired for her sophistication and culture. The elite of the town would send their sons to the tawa’if’s residence to be educated in manners and letters.

After the revolt of 1857, Indian Muslims lost the privileges they had enjoyed for a long time. Their role in the revolt meant that Muslim losses in terms of power and privileges were greater than those suffered by other communities. Unlike the Hindus, they began to feel increasingly distanced from the mainstream, and could not come to terms with their continuously deteriorating condition. Holding the British responsible for their miseries, an alienation of sorts from the Western way of life set in, to the extent that even English education was considered profane. Maulvi Nazir revealed his father's hostility towards English education thus: ‘He would rather see me die than learn English’. Men sought to safeguard their religion, culture and caste by confining their females within their homes. As a result, they began lagging behind in the race for progress.

The uprising of 1857 seemed to have awakened Muslims from a long slumber. Fortunately, they found an outspoken leader in Sir Saiyid Ahmed Khan (1817–98), who was born in a leading Saiyid family of Delhi, and whose ancestors had served the Mughal court for generations. Sir Saiyid was the first Muslim to question every aspect of life in Muslim society, and highlight how their ignorance was leading to the deteriorating condition.

I am grateful to the many women I have interacted with in the course of three decades of my research on spirituality. Of them, it can be truly said that dissent from orthodox understandings of religion, and the shattering of liminalities in the spiritual domain, was the warp and weft of their very existence. Although my study focused on women, this would be equally true of spiritual masters like Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Ramana Maharshi, Narayana Guru or the Sufi masters, Bulleh Shah or Lalon Fakir.

One of my early interactions was with Gomati Rajangam of Varanasi, an erudite Sanskrit and Hindi scholar and author of a commentary on the Kasi Khandam. Niece of the Tamil poet and nationalist leader Subramanya Bharatiyar, Gomati was married into an affluent family. The untimely demise of her husband brought home to the young woman all the travails and cruelties of widowhood. She told me that she travelled ticketless to Kasi, believing that it was better to die in Kasi than live the ignoble life imposed on her by the male relatives who robbed her of all the property. She lived on for the next 75 years in her chosen place on the Kedarghat of the Ganga and her everyday life was a celebration of the presence of god.

In the case of Gomati Rajangam and many like her, both men and women, dissent was not an oppositional category to be juxtaposed against norms but the very definition of true spirituality. In the three decades I have spent encountering and interacting with such figures, either in the Himalayas, on the river banks of Rishikesh and Varanasi or in the hermitage of Ramanashramam in Tiruvannamalai, this truth has been borne upon me and my heart goes out to these ‘devout dissenters’ with overflowing gratitude.

Amongst one of the greatest religious personalities of India, Ramanuja has an enduring reputation of a social reformer who dared to defy the Brahmanical orthodoxy of his times by democratizing temple worship for the marginalized castes of society. One of the radical steps he is supposed to have taken in this direction was to shout out the dvaya mantra, exclusively meant for the brahmins, from the top of the temple tower at Tirukkottiyur so that everyone, irrespective of their caste status, could hear, learn and recite it. Thus, such occurrences in the life of Ramanuja have delineated him as a rebel saint who dissented against the Brahmanical convention, caste hierarchy and political order of the day, and simultaneously evolved the Vishishtadvaita exegesis, developing a structure of devotion that involved large sections of society in the attainment of salvation and direct accessibility to the divine.

Hence, the association of Ramanuja with dissent and devotion has been the central belief of the Shrivaishnava community of South India, for whom Ramanuja was the founder, who organized the community and gave it an exegetical basis through the Vishishtadvaita Vedanta. Thus, one knows about Ramanuja's life, his beliefs, his catholicity and compassion. We know what his biographers tell us: in this case, the hagiographies whose authors were located in a particular context and, through Ramanuja's attitude of dissent and devotion, were putting forward a certain vision for the Shrivaishnava community and attempting to create a particular kind of collective consciousness within the community.

Varthamanapusthakam, which was written in the 1790s by Father (Fr) Thomas Paremakkal as an account of his travel along with his friend Mar Joseph Kariyattil to Madras, Africa, Brazil, Portugal and Rome and often hailed as the first travelogue in an Indian language, has been used as a literary medium by the author to ventilate his dissent and anger against the hegemonic attitude and the colonial fabric which the European religious missionaries set up for the church in India, particularly for the St Thomas Christians of Kerala. Arguing vehemently that India should be ruled by Indians and not by foreigners, he demands, as early as 1785, that Indian Christians should be ruled not by European religious missionaries but by Indians. Within the larger format of a travelogue detailing meticulously the socio-economic and political processes of the several countries he visited in Africa, South America and Europe, he argues his case by showing how the foreign missionaries, fearing reduction of the span of their power and authority, did not want to have another bishop for the St Thomas Christians and how the innocent priests of this community were brutally killed (as in the case of Chacko Kathanar of Edappilly, who was starved to death in their jails) and the very community often fined for the blunders and crimes of omissions and negligence of these foreign missionaries.

Fr Thomas Paremakkal and Fr Joseph Kariyattil made their travels to Portugal and Rome based on the decision of the general body of the St Thomas Christians taken at Angamaly, for the purpose of informing the Pope and the queen of Portugal of the various discriminations, sufferings and difficulties that this community experienced over a considerable period of time from the foreign Carmelite missionaries working in Kerala. As the general meeting of the representatives of this community at Angamaly was dominated by feelings of anger and animosity against the European religious missionaries and the European bishop working in Kerala, the travelogue has anti-Europeanism as its basic thread, critiquing the hegemonic and colonial fabric of the church set up by the European missionaries. Stressing the need for going back to the pre-Portuguese days when democratic institutions of yogams (representative body at the grassroots levels), mahayogams (representative bodies at higher levels) with jathikkukarthaviyan (head of the community) existed among this community for their administration, instead of one-man centred or European notion of bishop-centred administration, the travelogue challenges the notion of authority that the European missionaries had set up within the colonial fabric they had created for the Church of the St Thomas Christians.

Over the years, my interest in the Kabir Panth and Kabir has often centred on the social dimensions of the beliefs and practices that they have advocated and, more specifically, on the dissent they have expressed against the more dominant socio-religious ideology of varnashramadharma. In general, I have argued in favour of the view that the social and religious dissent that Kabir and his followers have fostered has had important consequences, even though there never existed much chance for them to break the hegemony of upper-caste dominance. The present essay will criticize some of the arguments that have been used by other scholars to largely discount the importance of the socio-religious dissent promoted by Kabir and his followers against the varnashramadharma ideology. The essay will also discuss some of the ideas about Kabir's socio-religious ideology presented by Purushottam Agrawal in his new book, Akath Kahani Prem ki: Kabir ki Kavita aur unka Samay. First, however, I need to, very briefly, review a few of the salient features of the dissent found in the compositions of Kabir and the Kabir Panth.

Kabir's compositions are remarkable for his insistence on the necessity for both religious and social reform. He attacks not only superficial and superstitious religious rituals in both Hindu religion and Islam but also the sacred authority of religious texts: the Vedas, the Puranas and the Koran. He also attacks the pretensions to social superiority of high-class persons, particularly Brahmins and kazis, often with amusing but quite vicious satire. Today, he would undoubtedly be hauled before a court of justice for his insults to both the Hindu and Muslim religions and for fomenting religious conflict.

This chapter tries to understand and analyse the impact of the British judicial system on the rights of Indian Muslim women in the late nineteenth century. Examining the problems faced by Indian Muslim women, it looks at the positive and negative aspects of the British judicial system, as well as the response of the Muslim community to it. Bernard Cohn stated, ‘It cannot be denied that in India the laws that exist today grew out of a colonial legal system, with its bipolarity of authority and norms that derived from the indigenous and the colonial systems.’ This chapter will also focus on the development of the Indian legal system, and its impact on women.

Several of the problems that Indian Muslim women faced arose from the British perception of Indian Muslims. Taking all Muslims all over the world as one monolithic category, the British assumed that Indian Muslims were similar to those they had come in contact with in Europe and other Arab countries. They were unclear about who a Musalman really was. The British referred to Muslims as ‘Moors’ because of the language the latter used. The word ‘Moor’ was considered pidgin, or, as Gilchrist thought of it, as barbarian gabble. Another British fallacy was assuming that Indian Muslims could be understood from the Holy Books, and that religious dogmas were the Muslims' only concern.

Several myths and stories tell of women's resistance to male-dominated society. In any discussion on gender, aspects of patriarchy and caste hierarchy—particularly in the Indian context—cannot be overlooked. Janaki Nair connected these two factors with the legal rights of Indian women. Patriarchy often perceives women as merely sources of entertainment and child-producing machines.

This chapter explores the diverse shades of the lives of Indian Muslim women. Indian Muslims lead lives that are very similar to Hindus in most respects, especially vis-à-vis customs and living conditions. A number of local customs, not inscribed in the Quran, prevail among Indian Muslim—chhatti, chilla, manjha, rasm-e mehndi, chauthi, soem; and some obligations such as aqiqa, khatna bismillah khawani and aameen. Some ashra'f Muslims practised only those customs inscribed in the Quran and Sunnah. The dearth of evidence on ajlaf and arzal girls (save what is available in European accounts and oral history) creates a problem: How are they to be depicted in writing? A number of patriarchal folk songs sung on different occasions reflect how these were celebrated in Muslim families, and what the status of women in society was.

In the field of social sciences, the second half of the nineteenth century in India is generally considered a period of transition, both socially and economically. The revolt of 1857 led to significant changes, not only in British administrative policies but also in the attitudes of the subjects of the British Empire in India. The second half of the nineteenth century, according to Natrajan, was a period of social reform. However, the general belief of Muslim scholars is that there was a growing consciousness among Hindus to bring about social change, while the Indian Muslims chose to remain in a backward state. In the second half of the nineteenth century, social awareness for reform was generally gauged by the growing literacy rate amongst Hindu women, and it was assumed that educationally, Indian Muslim women lagged behind considerably.

This chapter reviews the state of education among women, particularly Indian Muslim women, in the United Provinces. This chapter states that like their Hindu counterparts, Indian Muslim women, too, were educated. Again, like Hindu women, education among Indian Muslim women was determined by class demarcations in social and economic terms.

This book attempts to understand the social and economic profile of women, particularly the Muslim women of the United Provinces. The first question that lay before me while starting this book was: Why choose the United Provinces (UP) and not those regions where Muslims live in sizeable numbers? The Sachar Committee Report of November 2006 states that Indian Muslims lag behind others in development indices, and that the condition of Indian Muslim women is worse than that of Dalit women. The report's data and analysis highlights the pathetic condition of their education and socio-economic status in UP.

Traditionally, the position accorded to women is gauged either by that of their husbands or the status of their families; they do not possess a separate identity of their own. Few women from the upper classes were economically independent; most women were reliant on their husbands or other male members of their family. In fact, almost all religious scriptures affirm women's economic dependence on men. The second largest chapter of the Quran states:

From time immemorial, women belonging to lower social orders had contributed to their means of subsistence, and therefore appeared free from unnecessary restraint. Since for centuries the Indian economy has been based on agriculture, a large portion of its population was directly or indirectly dependant on land. Among the female population, about 59.3 per cent of women belonged to the agriculture class; however, only 4.8 per cent owned their land.

This chapter explores the economic condition of Indian Muslim women and the extent to which they enjoyed property rights. To properly understand their economic condition, it looks at Indian Muslim women of two classes, viz., the landed class and the occupational class. Since one-fifth of the land in the United Provinces belonged to Muslims, it is essential to investigate the colonial land system before investigating the condition of peasant women.

Introduction

The Bhakti movement in South India initially emerged as a dissent tradition against the orthodox Vedic Brahmanism and stood for social equality. But at a certain point in time, bhakti becamean ideological instrument in the hands of ruling elites and justified social inequalities. For the sake of its survival, the radical flavour of the Bhakti movement gradually receded to the background and the movement came to depend upon the patronage of ruling elites. The essay explores how the cittar or siddha tradition, which nurtured radical views against social injustice, came to fill the vacuum created by the degenerate Bhakti movement and of how such voices dissent eventually gave birth to an alternative value system and a new mode of devotion. It is argued that the cittar tradition cannot be studied alone as a theological response to bhakti but there is a need to understand how it represented the overall contemporary discontent of the common man against the socio-political institutions created by the bhakti ideology. Hence, the essay also studies epigraphic references to people's resistances against socio-political institutions and thus looks at their relevance to the dissents in cittar literatures.

Bhakti and Ideological Subjugation

The picture of society indicated in the early Tamil literatures shows us that kin relations and the ideology of heroism defined the early social formation. But the dominant scenarios of early social formation withered away by the beginning of the first millennium AD. The characteristics and practices of early social formation, such as predatory politics, cattle raids and warfare, sharing food with commoners and even kinship bonds in production, had lost their grip. Conversely, a new social formation, structured by the ethos of plough agriculture, began to develop. As production activity was modelled more on the agrarian economy, values and institutions of the agrarian social relations were produced and reproduced. This led to the growth of composite social relations in which the state and religion were integral.

During the three days from 11 March to 13 March 2010, a rich and remarkable scholarly event was held on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. It was a major international conference devoted to a critical examination and discussion on a wide variety of the forms of religious devotion and sectarian practice and, more provocatively, to the various types of dissent that these forms have engendered over the longue durée of Indian history. The event, conceived and organized by Professor Vijaya Ramaswamy of the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU and hosted by the Centre, brought together scholars – both Indian and foreign – who were experts in many different religious and linguistic traditions as these traditions have evolved in different regions of the subcontinent from antiquity through the medieval period and down to modernity.

The conference – the papers presented at which appear in the present volume– represented an original and productive turn in the study of the history of religious movements over time in South Asia. It focused scholarly attention specifically on the frequently overlooked currents of dissent within and against several major, mainstream religious movements and organizations that are often represented as the uncontested, if not the exclusive, representatives of their respective faiths in India and throughout the Indian diaspora. In highlighting the phenomenon of dissent, the conference thus productively focused the attention of the scholars in attendance, and one would hope, of those who have the opportunity to read the present collection of the proceedings, on some less fully examined aspects of Indian religions.

A History of Protest from Past to Present

Sumanta Banerjee

The rise of the fakirs, who come mostly from the Muslim community, was not an isolated phenomenon in the history of Bengali society and religion. They were a part of a wider constellation of numerous syncretistic religious sects that shone over the Bengali popular religious scene during the sixteenth to seventeenth century. They continued to thrive in rural Bengal through the British colonial period, and still survive in the villages of Bengal. These sects occupy a special position in the history of Bengali popular religion, creating a subculture of their own. One nineteenth century Bengali scholar, Akshay Kumar Dutta, listed some fifty-odd syncretistic sects, which flourished all over India during his lifetime, and which originated in the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Among them, at least forty were found in Bengal alone.

The development and popularity of these syncretistic sects should be understood in a dual context: first, the socio-religious composition of Bengali society at the time of their birth; and second, the cultural tradition that continues down to the present times in rural society, where people require songs and music not only for entertainment but also for their deep spiritual needs.

To go back to the socio-religious past that gave birth to these sects and their songs, we should note that Bengali society at that time was occupied by the twin religious establishments: one ruled by the Brahmanical order according to strictly laid down hierarchical caste-bound norms for the Hindus; and the other by the ashrafs (Muslim aristocrats and clergy who claimed descent from the earlier Arab, Turkish, Afghan and Moghul settlers) for the Muslims.