Book Review: Tarini Bedi,The Dashing Ladies of Shiv Sena: Political Matronage in Urbanizing India

The dominant image of Shiv Sena’s politics features a youthful male cadre under the watchful eyes of its grand patriarch, Bal Thackeray, militantly campaigning in public spaces styling themselves as ‘sons of the soil’. Tarini Bedi’s book offers a refreshing departure from these imaginations of Shiv Sena, by offering insight into the often-ignored world of its women in three urban centres of Maharashtra: Mumbai, Pune and Nashik. The author does this through an ethnographic exploration of female party workers at the ground level, where a lot of local battles are fought and won through informal negotiations, political posturing and an idiom of familiarity and local knowledge. It also takes us beyond the discussions on institutional politics and centralized party units into the murky and complex domain of everyday political networks, building upon an existing literature on Indian politics that focuses on practices and processes of Indian democracy to re-examine the norm itself (p. 244).

Most importantly, Bedi sets forth a gendered understanding of informal politics, governed by the idiom of ‘matronage’, opposed to the more dominant understanding of such mediation as patronage. Matronage as a practice enables these women to assume a more powerful position while being embedded in the networks of kinship, care and household. In this sense, Bedi takes the gendered subject of Shiv Sena politics away from ‘intentionality’ into the ‘sites and networks’ of political practice, where they fashion themselves as ‘dashing’ ladies (p. 237).

‘Dashing’—a term central in Bedi’s ethnographic exploration, is undergirded by an affective charge, heightening political presence of the otherwise marginal female subjects. It is tied to personal transformation as also engendered through control over an urban public space (p. 71). As one of Bedi’s respondents puts it, ‘See daring means dashing. It means, not to be afraid […] go forward with himmat, don’t move aside or run away […] being scared outside the house is something I have never been and I never will’ (p. 74). Or as Durva, one of the Shiv Sena leaders from Pune says, ‘It is essential to have a loud voice […] if I soften my voice they will get rid of me from this post’ (p. 215). In these terms, dashing is an aggressive and performative embodiment of ‘daring’ and a spatial transgression, generating a certain kind of mobility in the city.

Staking claims in the politics of urban re-development is another mode of understanding women’s politics in Shiv Sena, which Bedi brings out succinctly. This also adds a distinct dimension to the burgeoning literature on urban studies in India, by bringing in the role of female mediators. Most of the scholars working on this everyday politics of negotiation in contemporary Indian context, especially from the side of marginal and displaced populations in rapidly changing cities have concentrated on the trope of masculinity inherent in this claim-making. An important interlocutor for Bedi has been Partha Chatterjee and the category of ‘political society’ created by him, which she engages with in the later part of this book. However, according to her, its predominantly male actors in the context of more danger-prone working class slums, makes it a ground unfit for a ‘feminine agent’ (p. 244). Bedi draws out the distinction between women’s transgressions of law from that of men’s, ‘even if women often co-opt masculinized and dominant strategies of political brokerage, the experience of this authority and routes through which political, material and symbolic resources get channelled are often quite distinct’ (ibid.). Here, Bedi invokes a typical lateral economy of distribution of political and material resources when mediated through women than a more hierarchical one.

In Nashik and Pune, their space of action is the emerging fault lines in the cities’ older quarters—densely packed neighbourhoods, known as peths locally. The instance of politics in the red-light district of Budhvar peth in Pune brings out this posturing. Durva, an influential Shiv Sena leader in the area, stays at the backdrop of electoral politics, however, manages the political and social affairs of the area. She voices discontent of the local community against re-development and commercialization of the area (p. 219), and has staked herself out as the malkin of the neighbourhood—providing for and sharing the vulnerabilities of her so-called immoral constituents—low caste, migrant, commercial sex workers (p. 222). She is not just a caretaker of the community, but is also fluent in languages spoken by the migrants of the area, Nepali and Kannada, making her a popular and accessible figure.

As the liminal spaces of red light areas and slums transform into political and economic battlegrounds, the perpetually endangered moral community here, is managed and sustained by the ‘matronage’ of local Shiv Sena women. The informal ‘networks’ created by these women are a part of postcolonial governance and in the case of women, heavily sutured by kinship, age, ethics of care and their knowledge of streets, people and social relations in their neighbourhoods. It is then no surprise that a lot of these women ‘brokers’ started out their careers as balwadi workers in working class neighbourhoods and took up the role of ‘malkins’ or landladies with the rising tide of de-industrialization and informal labour.

Bedi’s meticulous description of homes of these women, which double up as their offices also reflects the practice of ‘adjustment’, another trope in the fashioning of Shiv Sena women. As Bedi points out, ‘the private of the home is an increasingly fluid category’ (p. 194). For several of Bedi’s respondents, the first encounter with public life was through their courtyard houses or wadas, where the public and the private often overlapped in the common space of the open courtyard. The women corps in their everyday negotiations and transgressions embody this easy mobility between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. Sauraksha, a Shiv Sena corporator from Nashik’s old quarters lives in a wada, whose ground floor is dedicated to ‘office space’ (p. 196). She meets her women supporters in her living room, kitchen and even in her sleeping quarter, when ‘excessive privacy’ is required (ibid.). Most of her constituents are Marwari and Gujarati shopkeepers, who meet her after business gets over for the day. Her domesticity is thus ‘adjusted’ to the rhythms and temporality of her political life. For her and many other leaders, multigenerational and joint family set up enable their ‘mobility’, offering them break from domestic obligations. Here, Bedi engages in a complex discussion on female agency and freedom, which is embedded in multiple forms of household and family rather than stemming from abstract individualism.

While the book is replete with extensive ethnographic description and nuanced analysis, it makes one wonder about the efficacy and nature of political mediation by women in non-urban environments. If cities are the constituency of Shiv Sena’s politics, perhaps its logic needs to be fleshed out vis-à-vis rural politics. Is the trope of ‘dashing’ equally tenable in a rural setting, or is it connected to urban mobility? Even when Bedi discusses public spectacles and visibility as major mechanisms of garnering political legitimacy by Shiv Sena women, some popular cultural events of the state like Ganesh Utsav are conspicuously absent from the narrative. Does this absence indicate towards the varied layers of performativity and public space in Maharashtra’s urban politics?

By bringing into focus de-industrialized urban neighbourhoods and rising tide of informality in politics and economy, the book makes a significant contribution not only in the field of anthropological studies of politics in contemporary India but also in research emerging on urban space and gender.