Gendered Honor: How Mass Common Sense Shaped India's Foreign Policy in Jammu and Kashmir, 1947–1950

Abstract

Abstract How do the masses shape foreign policy? This question has been examined through various conceptual lenses—national identity, public opinion, and popular culture. At the core of all these approaches is an argument that “taken for granted” ideas matter because they constitute a society's mass common sense, in turn influencing assorted political possibilities. What remains to be theorized is how and why such influence occurs. This paper argues that mass common sense sets the limits of legitimacy within societal discourse, thus shaping all political and policy discourses, including foreign policy. The paper evaluates this argument in the case of India's decision to militarily intervene in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947. This is done in two steps. The first is to reconstruct India's common sense circa 1947, and this is done from popular Hindi–Urdu language sources such as children's literature and films. The second is to trace possible ways through which commonsensical notions of gender, beauty, and honor influenced the Nehru government toward intervention. The study's conclusions have relevance for interpretivist theories of foreign policy as well as for Indian foreign policy, specifically the persistence of India's tendency to prioritize certain “regions” over others—and the Kashmir Valley and Jammu above all—over most if not all other foreign policy issue areas.