Udupi college hijab ban: the uniform of uniformity

The controversy over hijab-clad female students not being allowed into the classroom at a government college in Karnataka is a symptom of aggressive nationalism. A democratic society must accommodate the many different practices of the self with their many social and religious armatures in order to open up access to education, especially to women, writes PARINITHA.

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ONE way of disciplining bodies into uniformity is through the uniform. The disciplinary measure of uniformising bodies is never in the service of affirming egalitarian membership of a community, whether pedagogic or professional or national. Hierarchies of power are marked out through the sartorial protocols of uniforms. The bodies of employees, students, and workers, among others, are massed into collectives through the uniformity of uniforms. As against this, power displays itself through the singularity of its sartorial and bodily markers or through the privilege of being impervious to the disciplinary regime of uniforms.

In a government college in Udupi, Karnataka, a group of hijab-clad girls have not been allowed into the classroom for a month now because they are said to be violating the rules of maintaining uniformity in the class room. What is seen as even more transgressive is these girls' defiant stand that they be granted the right to bear the markers of their religious identity in the class room. This steadfast and firm demand of the girls, in spite of the huge backlash they have been facing, has been construed as the unruliness of those who have to keep to their place both because of their gender as well as their religion.

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Classrooms are not religiously neutral spaces

First of all, we need to unpack the common sense of a uniformity that is not socially or historically embedded, and which has to be maintained in the classroom. The classroom has never been an areligious or socially neutral space, either in terms of the protocols or the content of pedagogy. Prayers are a part of the time table of the school day, religious festivals are celebrated in schools and colleges, and the body can never be divested of the markers of religion, whether in the form of ornaments or decorations on the skin, or the markers of caste, concealed or unconcealed. The ethical subject, performatively displayed in the classroom and disciplined into law-abiding citizenship through the school curriculum, has a strong religious dimension and foundation. Given this fact, why should the hijab be seen as violative of the rules of uniformity in the classroom?

One answer could be that the religious provenance of many of the rituals performed in educational institutions, like an invocation to Goddess Saraswathi at the beginning of a function, or the celebration of Ganesh Chathurthi in colleges, through being associated with the majoritarian religion, have been glossed over as universal and areligious, and displayed as part of an institutionally organized and mandated set of secular rituals. Secondly, an aggressive nationalism that is founded on religion will brutally erase all signs of cultural and religious diversity in an attempt at homogenizing the national identity that it wants to corporeally and culturally coerce into existence.

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Religious markers as part of the self

Another way of looking at this event has been to see these girls as the victims of religious patriarchy. Either they are seen as reluctantly submitting to the imposition of a dress code imposed on them by their religion and the patriarchy that is mandated by this religion, or they are seen to be submitting to this imposition willingly as a result of religious indoctrination.

If that is so, and if the hijab is worn as a reluctant submission to patriarchy in order to gain certain concessions in return, then there is all the more reason for educational institutions to be sympathetic to the cause of these girls. Their submission to patriarchy, reluctantly or willingly, in no way makes them ineligible to access their fundamental right to education. And if the only way for them to get educated is by submitting to a dress code that is coerced on them, then it is incumbent on educational institutions to become more flexible so as to accommodate and lighten the constrained conditions under which they are permitted to access education. Across religions and cultures, women have been made to bear the markers of cultural and religious identity and this is not peculiar to the hijab wearing girls.

But more importantly, religion is a part of the sedimented layers of subjectivity through which all of us are constructed and constituted. To be asked to sanitise the practices of being of all religious imprint and influence is to be asked to dismantle the self. What the hijab-clad girls are asking for is to be allowed to retain the integrity of a historically and socially constituted practice of the self through which they understand and live their lives. If one of the ways in which the historical and cultural specificity of this subjectivity is displayed is through the wearing of the hijab, this act should be understood from within the terms of legibility of that historical mode of being. This requires a difficult translation.

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In her book where she attempts to theorise women's agency in the context of the women's piety movement in Cairo, Pakistani-American anthropology professor Saba Mahmood wrote, "agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms."

A radically egalitarian society will accommodate the many different practices of the self with their many social and religious armatures. Such a society will also accommodate and provide spaces of experiment and exploration for those who suffer a discomfort of being. The class room should be one such democratic space where a pedagogy of radical equality is initiated and put into practice.

(Parinitha is a professor at the Department of English, Mangalore University. The views expressed are personal.)