Gender, Nation, Religion: The Discursive Construction of Identities in India's Democracy, 1952-1956.

Current social science holds that identities are socially constructed. Yet the insights of constructivism still have to be operationalized. Most political science studies have taken identities (whether ethnic, national, gendered, or otherwise) as independent variables, and used them to explain political outcomes. This paper reverses the causal arrow and contends that constructivism tells us that identities themselves require explanation. Accordingly, it takes identities and identity construction as dependent variables, and tries to explain how a given set of identities was constructed in one particular spatial and temporal context. Specifically, the paper examines how religious, gender, and national identities were discursively constructed in early postcolonial India, by examining legislative debates over the reform and codification of Hindu family law in the 1950s. Two key conclusions emerged from the analysis. First, the discursive construction of these different forms of identity was highly interconnected: the construction of religion and nationalism could not be understood without gender; nor could the impact of nationalism on religion and gender be captured by studying any of them in isolation. Both Hindu socio-religious tradition and secular Indian nationalism were gendered constructs: gender was constitutive of religious and national identity in this time period. Second, political factors were central to how these discursive identities were constructed, at least at three levels: the democratic political system; the state; and individual leadership. Accordingly, I suggest that identities are not just socially but politically constructed; and as such, unraveling and explaining these processes is a critical task for political science. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]