Accounting for <i>Hijab</i>: Interrogating the Post-Secular

Abstract

This article questions the idea of the ‘post-secular’ as a category for understanding Indian women’s experience of religion as an existential practice in neocolonised capitalist patriarchy. The majoritarian state’s manipulation of an identitarian regime of signification to use and control women’s lives is located in a plural, democratic society that is currently riven by the violent politics of conflicting religious and secular constructions of <i>hijab</i>, a head covering worn by Muslim women. From an engaged ideological perspective that seeks radical transformation, feminist struggle includes the right to practice and profess one’s faith, against a majoritarian norm that bulldozes difference and imposes its prescriptions as ideal. This article aims to show, from a feminist perspective, the manipulation of significatory practices in India, linking women’s ‘dress’ with progress to essentialise and politicise identity. It questions whether redressal against violence wrought on women by religious fundamentalism can be found in a secular state policy, based on the norm of equality of difference. Feminist practice would actively use the guarantees given to the citizen by a pluralist secular constitution to challenge the violence of interlinked discriminations, necessary for the survival of a plural society in which diversities co-exist.