The previous chapter argued that we need to take seriously the distinction between the police force as an institution and policing as a form of social action. Policing practices, it suggested, are far more generally dispersed across the terrain of the social and are not only concentrated in the formal state institution that in fact may rely on, or mirror, forms of sovereignty that are anchored in the family or the community. This chapter focuses on how the work of policing, even in its institutional form, is not just about ways of seeing, the strategic deployment of information, or the heroic celebration of masculine work. Instead, I argue that work of policing is also primarily a form of labor, often performed under conditions of great physical and infrastructural duress. In the popular imagination in India, the police are often denigrated as corrupt and ineffective, but the military is extolled as a superhero. Both attributions eclipse the fact that policing also entails often difficult forms of labor. This chapter argues that forms of sovereign power that are embodied in the military are nevertheless rendered vulnerable when we take into account the laboring body that is stretched both physiologically and psychologically in the course of their work. In this chapter, a shared experience of wartime labor allows for a very particular kind of civil-military intimacy to develop between the armed forces, who labor to protect the country’s territorial borders, and Patidar women, who subscribe to a collective ethic of hard work through everyday forms of manual labor.1 Through the shared experience of laboring under exceptionally trying circumstances that pushed their levels of bodily and emotional endurance to a degree not encountered before, Patidar women who worked on rebuilding a bombed runway during the 1971 war with Pakistan remind us that the work of policing is a physically and emotionally demanding one.
Their experience draws attention to the gendered labor of policing not because women are enlisted in military work for their so-called maternal or caregiving capacities but because their experience of wartime labor allows us to understand the ambivalent affects—fear, freedom from familial constraints, and exhilaration—entailed in working for the military. These affects are actively produced as a consequence of women’s enlisting for the military during an extraordinary wartime moment and do not exist solely in the more generic forms of civilian pride in the military that exists in the mode of spectatorship rather than participation. They are ambivalent about recent political moves to appropriate their efforts as heroic mothers of the nation; instead, they insist on the embodied, raw, physical attributes of their labor that is rendered not as extraordinary heroism but as everyday courage and strength—himmat—that is forged through close interaction with and under the tutelage of the military. This episode, as recounted by two Patidar women, Viru and Hiru, allows me to gender the concept of sovereignty and to reflect on its limits—a vulnerability that is experienced through the body, that resists masculinist tropes of sovereignty as infallible and totalizing (Osuri 2018). This chapter brings together the everyday and the extraordinary in a single analytical framework to understand civil-military relations. The militarization of a civilian population is not a state of exception, experienced only during wartime or commemorated through public, political memorials; instead, it is an integral aspect of peacetime and is one of the conditions that shape civilians’ experiences of peace.
Since the location of this ethnography is a national borderland, it is saturated with all kinds of civil and military policing practices. This allows me to underscore that the way in which this book—even when it refers to the police as institutional arm of the state—expands the definition of police to include not just the civil police but also various types of paramilitary forces (such as the Border Security Force [BSF]) and the armed forces (army and air force). The anthropology of war and militarization has pointed to the gradual redefinition of the domains of the strictly “civil” and the “military,” with armies becoming more involved in “civilian” tasks such as welfare, education, and development (Bhan 2013). Armies have become more reliant on nonmilitary personnel and services, which is also another way of saying that civilian life is becoming more militarized, so that the distinction between the two domains becomes blurred (Lutz 2001, 220). One of the classic distinctions between civil police and the armed forces—where the former has charge of internal order, the latter of external territorial defense—has been erased in present times. The militarization of everyday life in postcolonial, democratic contexts such as India is manifested in “the privileging of the military in domestic and foreign policy, where it connotes a progressive increase in the military capacity of the state, and the use of domestic [military] force by the state to secure the acquiescence of social groups” (Kazi 2009, 23–24). Civil political control of the army in democratically elected popular governments makes untenable the distinction between civil and military regimes (Kazi 2009). On the other side, expanding jurisdictions of national police forces in Europe and the United States along with the easing of institutional checks and balances on their power, especially in the context of post-9/11 antiterror legislations, has also erased some of the classic distinctions between internal and external policing through the police and the army, respectively (Fassin 2013, 216–217; Samimian-Darsah and Stalcup 2017).
This chapter begins by disaggregating the multiple faces of uniformed peacekeeping/law enforcing that people encounter in an everyday context in Bhuj, the taluka subdivision where this ethnography is based. Bhuj houses the district police headquarters for Kutch Police, a body that is under the jurisdiction of the elected state government. They take care of law and order, traffic, and crime and are organized across various thana or beat jurisdictions. In addition, they also deal with the registration of foreigners and the issue of tourist permits to visit “restricted areas.” They maintain citizenship and visa records of family members who visit from Pakistan and women who have married Indian citizens in Kutch, and in this, Kutch Police constitute an interface with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in New Delhi. In collaboration with the various intelligence services, the civil police (as opposed to the “military”) also handle the detention of “illegal infiltrators” and investigation of “trafficking” cases, discussed in chapter 3. This wing of the police force recruits locally, and these policemen are far more socially embedded in the everyday contexts of life in Bhuj than the military, which thrives on a social distance from the local. Therefore, the civil police force is also less deified as an institution.
Bhuj is also an important base for the Indian Air Force (IAF), a wing of the Indian Armed Forces, and the BSF, a centrally constituted paramilitary body in charge of border patrol. Thus, the landscape of security and policing in a borderland such as this is fairly variegated and complex. The next sections track the experience of these quite distinct agents of institutional policing for the citizen, examining the ethnographic nuance of the term militarywala (military man) as it is threaded into everyday conversations and encounters within an overall context of everyday militarization that is nonetheless not evocative of war or occupation but is seen as a basic constituent of peacetime. The presence of absence of militarization is not necessarily an indicator of wartime or peacetime as mutually exclusive temporalities. Militarization of a borderland is also experienced and normalized as an integral part of “peacetime.”
Living in Bhuj, I was acutely conscious of its militarization in everyday registers, yet it is not an area under formal occupation or war. Its occupation by the military is a sign of everyday peace, a potent reminder to citizens of their location along a national border with an “enemy” country a stone’s throw away. “Civil-military” interactions, however we may define the content of either category, have a routine and everyday quality to them here. The term military was invariably used in English across conversations that took place variously in Kutchi, Gujarati, or Hindi. A range of actions and affects were attributed to the militarywala ranging from aggression and hubris, to care and fraternal concern. The “military” is present ubiquitously in the everyday: they own lands and buildings, cars, and jeeps and are an unmistakable part of the physical and social landscape.2 They patronize shops in the market and rent houses and workshops, all providing a reliable source of income for locals. Although military presence in Bhuj certainly does contribute to the local economy, primarily through the recruitment of cooks and drivers, this does not contribute in any significant way to the “political economy of feelings” (Ali 2019) with respect to it.3 The military infrastructure in Bhuj is marked by a social distance from the local population, in continuation from colonial practice. Army, air force, and border security officials sent to the region are always recruited from elsewhere. They do not speak the local language and tend to live as much as possible in residential enclaves (the “cantonment”), or barracks if they are young men posted out in their battalions. Among senior officers, their children go to separate schools and their wives socialize in segregated clubs that are all a part of cantonment life. They are discouraged from mingling with the local population as far as possible. The structure of awe and deference and disinclination to critique that is felt by the locals toward the military is less because they are an avenue of employment than the fact that the military is presented to the civilian population in the mode of a spectatorship that encourages hero worship and national pride, as will be seen below.
The “military” has also left an unmistakable stamp on the sonic landscape of the city. On countless occasions, I sat with friends on their front porch steps talking into the night as aircraft of the IAF practiced their routine drills, dramatically blazing trails of orange fire darting across the night sky. The deafening roar of military aircraft often punctuates conversation during the day and becomes a way of marking time; people could easily distinguish between these and the (relatively) softer sounds of civilian aircraft arriving and departing. They seemed accustomed to the ear-splitting sounds of the military jets that although they had normalized themselves in the everyday, yet evoked a shared experience of the necessity of aggression for the production of an everyday peace. They distinguished these from the sounds of civilian aircraft arriving and departing. In the middle of interviews, people would pause and point upward: “It’s [the flight] left for [or arrived from] Mumbai,” followed by some comment on whether it was late. Military aircraft were just accepted as a matter of course, even though the sonic disruption (and discomfort) was significantly higher. Young children would continue playing outdoors even as they dramatically covered their ears for effect. Mohamed Hosain’s young granddaughter had never quite gotten over the sounds of fighter jets that punctuated her life quite literally from the day she was born. As a toddler, she would squeeze her eyes shut tightly, cover her ears, and snuggle into her mother’s arms each time a jet flew past. Growing older, she refused to enter a movie theater because of her lasting fear of loud, reverberating sounds, even as her twin sister reveled in the thrill of an outing and taunted her sister for being a “crybaby.” People were accustomed to these ear-splitting sounds that had nevertheless normalized themselves in the everyday; yet they generated various different affects that nevertheless shared a common evocation of war. Some people attributed their first sense of the terrifying earthquake on a cold winter morning in January 2001 to a military attack by Pakistan. Many middle-aged residents of Bhuj recalled the bombs that had fallen in the suburbs of Bhuj during the 1971 war; for them, the sounds of the earthquake were bodily assimilated first as a declaration of war by the “enemy” country just across the border. For others, these were also the reassuring sounds of peacetime. The regular air drills reminded some middle-class Hindu residents of Bhuj of what they saw as a performance of India’s superior military strength. “Don’t you think they can hear these sounds on the other side?” asked a retired schoolteacher as we sat sipping tea in his living room through the roar of the aircraft engines whose impact rattled the windowpanes as we spoke. “Achha hai [it is a good thing],” he commented approvingly. “Let them [Pakistan] know that we have an alert and well-trained force that is always ready to respond [jawab dene ke liye taiyar hai].”
The “military” may also be regarded with suspicion and annoyance. Bhuj is an important border station for the IAF; a couple of civil passenger flights operate during an hour or so every morning and afternoon out of a terminal that shares a runway with the military airport. This airport is a significant node in civilian-military interaction in the region. The terminal is simply built, perhaps in deference to the fact that it is projected primarily as a military installation or perhaps because it hosts only a handful of flights to Mumbai. There are extra security checks in place for passengers, and as with other “sensitive” and military spaces, photography is prohibited. On a pillar in the single room that serves as the departure lounge is a blue-and-white sign in the devanagari script: “Hindi hain hum; watan hai Hindustan hamara” (We are Indians; Hindustan is our homeland). These words are from Mohammad Iqbal’s famous Urdu poem “Sare jahan se achha … Hindustan hamara” (Better than the entire universe … is our Hindustan). Ironically, Iqbal was Pakistan’s poet laureate, and his poetic creation has been bypassed in contemporary India’s own nationalist self-perception, which tends to favor songs with a more Hindu nationalist imagery, for instance “Vande mataram” (Praise to the motherland). Nevertheless, these words are a reminder that national identity and belonging are not to be taken for granted, especially in a border area next to a military air base.
In another example of how the military was always perceived as being socially external to Kutch, people I met or traveled with frequently complained about the “ego clash” between the air force and civil airport authorities. It was common practice for passenger aircraft to have to wait for anywhere between five and twenty minutes on the runway awaiting air traffic control clearance while IAF aircraft completed their drill. Many of us were frustrated by these delays, which frequently entailed missed onward connections. “They [the IAF] set aside an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon for one single flight [on occasion, two] to land and to take off. These are scheduled hours; why must they do their military routine at exactly the same time? This is for show [dikhava], nothing else,” muttered aggrieved fellow passengers.
This sentiment was echoed by many others in Bhuj when they passed BSF trucks filled to the brim with uniformed soldiers on their way to and from their stations at border checkpoints. These trucks often stopped for tea at Bhirandiyara, a popular halt en route from Bhuj to Banni or the northern border checkpoint at Khawda. Young men were particularly irked by what they perceived as the high-handedness of the armed soldiers, none of whom spoke the local language; instances of road rage were common as they pressed down on the accelerator or drove in the middle of the road to prevent the BSF vehicle overtaking them. Driving in these contexts made possible the emergence of particular types of social and political subjectivities in encounter with specific others (see Bishara 2015). The suspicion seemed to be mutual as I discovered on the single occasion that I was invited to spend an evening at the air force officers’ mess in Bhuj. Over dinner, young air force officers displayed what struck me as a deep paranoia of civilian populations. Cautioning me against mingling too much with the “locals,” I was warned that many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were in fact front organizations for more “sinister” activities ranging from smuggling to terror and providing covert support even to the CIA! Yet garnering support from local civilian populations in border security was also a concern that was uppermost in the minds of visiting officers of the IAF as indicated, for instance, in the visitor’s book entry made by an officer on his visit to Gulbeg’s home in Banni discussed in chapter 1. The mutual suspicion that was routinely performed by either side does not discount other faces of civil-military interaction and intimacies.
Just as the soundscape of the city is integrally bound up with an unmistakably military presence in the city, there are other ways, both visual and affective, in which the region’s peacetime militarization is signaled. If the sound of IAF planes registered their presence across the skies in a magisterial fashion, the BSF jawan (soldier, literally [male] youth) was a regular presence in Bhuj and villages across the Rann. Uniformed BSF cadres were visible on the streets, in public teahouses and at bazaars, or in transit to and from their border posts in large trucks owned by the BSF. Policing the border is acknowledged to be a man’s work: it involves hard labor under adverse conditions. Unlike senior IAF officers posted on duty with their families, the BSF jawan was sent to “man” the borders, far away from his family and home region. They did not speak the local language and were posted as part of a battalion from one border to another, living in all-male barracks. Posters and hoardings extol the BSF’s contribution to border protection, depicting them as masculine superheroes, an act that erases the mundane labor involved, including hours of boredom on solitary border outposts.
Unlike beat policing—tasked to the civil police—which is not invoked as a particularly heroic or laudable task, and in general policemen are often castigated by ordinary citizens as lazy, corrupt, and deskbound, the BSF is part of a state-managed narrative that extols its manliness and bravery at the borders. Posters and hoardings to showcase the BSF are set up in border areas during the annual tourist festival of the Rann. During this four-month-long festival, the dry, barren surroundings are suddenly transformed by the periodic appearance of huge hoardings and posters in addition to the more routine signage that is the more general characteristic of border infrastructure in India. The everyday immersion of the military in Kutch in the routine sonic and visual ways described above contrasts with the spectacular presentation of the BSF soldier or the “border man” as superhero in these posters, usually packaged for tourists who will visit from other parts of the country. Images of male soldiers of the BSF in physically challenging terrain and combat situations are accompanied by militant-nationalist slogans such as BSF war cry: “Bharat mata ki jai” (Glory to Mother India); “Har jawan, desh ki shaan” (Every soldier, the nation’s pride); “Iss desh ki [sic] shahid ko koi chhoo nahi sakta, jis desh ki nigahewan hain seema suraksha bal ki aankhe” (Nobody can touch that country’s martyrs, whose guardians are the eyes of the BSF); “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war”; “Guards of frontiers of India: The border man”; “Hum seema ke prahari hain hum seena taan khade; hum bharat ke gaurav ki bankar pehchan khade” (We are the guardians of the border, we stand at attention; we stand as the symbols of India’s pride).
Although these hoardings and slogans invoke the BSF through hypermasculine affects that conjoin the “border man” to experiences of patriotism and pride in the state institutions of policing, they end up subordinating the everyday work of border patrol to the spectacular optics of policing as masculine work. Unlike sections of India’s eastern border with Bangladesh—also patrolled by the BSF—which are far more actively negotiated in daily comings and goings for visits to kin, markets, and jobs (Cons 2013; Ghosh 2017; van Schendel 2001), making the daily routine of the border officials quite packed with activity, a typical day for the border guard at the Kutch border is solitary and quiet. The endless landscape of desert and sky is unbroken except by the solitary movement of a fellow BSF jeep or the wanderings of a maldhari out in search of his herd. The periodic activity of tourists is welcomed by BSF jawans posted at the border. Those lucky tourists who are able to get permission through personal contacts in the army to “spectate” in otherwise restricted areas such as “India Bridge” beyond Khawda in northern Kutch are welcomed by the soldiers on duty who candidly admit that they literally can go out of their minds in the absence of human company day after day in these desert expanses. Even though the Kutch-Pakistan border is officially a “closed” border—that is, there is no legally sanctioned crossing point or road that connects the desert across the two countries4—one of the tasks of the border patrol officers is to search for “footprints,” the tangible, physical sign of cross-border activity. When such footprints (and camel hoofprints) are found and identified, they are assessed for their direction and intensity. Deep and heavy camel prints, for instance, lead to an unmistakable conviction that they are heavily laden with “arms” or “lethal material.” These reports make their way into the local newspapers and provide much by way of conjecture to the ongoing saga of cross-border infiltration and “terror.” On one visit to the border outpost in Lakhpat, as soon as I had left the village settlement behind, a young patrolman caught up asking officiously who I was and why I had bothered to come so far just to wander about; in those days, it was well off the regular tourist circuit. Besides, it was technically off limits, a “restricted zone.” “Where does the restricted zone begin?” I asked. “Right where you stand,” was his prompt response. We were perched on a rocky outcrop, just outside the sturdy fort walls. The rocks gave way to a beach-like zone that is partly seabed, partly Rann. “You can’t step down; that is restricted area,” says the young patrolman, agitated. He looked to me like he must just be out of school. This sandy bed is where trackers comb the ground for the appearance of “footprints” twice a day, searching desperately for evidence of cross-border activity to fragment the searing monotony of another endless day on the salt expanses. Success on this score is far less spectacular than the reports that are regularly churned out for local consumption by the media. For the most part, these border patrol guards are waiting for the day when they will be transferred to a more hospitable part of the country, somewhere they are more familiar with the language and local customs, where they are not assigned to futile weeks and months of combing the Rann for elusive “infiltrators” or tracking circuitous escape routes.
When posters and slogans invoke the BSF jawan as superhero and war as a spectacle for tourist consumption (e.g., Lutz 2001), they depict the military as a masculine force that uses its heroic powers to protect the nation’s borders.5 This is very much in line with the normative and gendered view of war and military protection that is carried out in the name of civilians, especially women and children (see Yuval-Davis 2013). Yet, as I have suggested above, representing the achievements of the “border man” in spectacular mode does not do justice to the everyday and mundane forms of labor that are entailed in the work of policing. The solitude and the boredom of a day on the border post is not captured in these more heroic renditions. In this section, I present a case of civil-military intimacy that although forged during a spectacular moment—during the 1971 war with Pakistan—nevertheless provides an extremely textured sense of the everyday labor of policing by men—and women. The women who form the subjects of a close intimacy with military men do not deify or sexualize this relationship. Instead, it is presented as a fraternal bond that is forged through physical labor performed together, literally on the battlefield. The rest of this chapter uses the example of women’s wartime mobilization in 1971 to discuss the consequences of the time when a number of women from a village close to Bhuj went from being contract construction workers to labor donors for the air force. Even as these ordinary women from a peasant caste labored during wartime, repairing a bombed airstrip in record time, they focus on the everyday work ethic and strength of the military rather than its spectacular dimensions alone. In this, they also resist the retrospective appropriation of their own labor into hypernationalist narratives of heroism and war, seeking to ground their experiences instead in the everyday rather than the extraordinary.
In August 2015, a “war memorial” was inaugurated a few kilometers east of Bhuj, in front of the main entrance to the village of Madhapar. The union defense minister flew in from New Delhi and presided over its unveiling. The desirability of a memorial had long been acknowledged in newspaper editorials and conversations among local intelligentsia; in these circles, there was a frequently expressed desire and need to publicly commemorate the contributions made by the border district of Kutch to postcolonial border defense and security, underlining the “sacrifices” made by its people in the process. The year 2015 was a significant date for the inauguration of the memorial. Although the year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 war with Pakistan, the memorial was not, in fact, dedicated to that war. In 2014, a Hindu nationalist government had just been elected into office in New Delhi. In the months and years following this, violence between Hindus and minorities such as Muslims, Christians, and Dalits (formerly “low”-caste people) increased substantially. Already in 2015, the government had been criticized for a growing climate of “intolerance” in the wake of the first of what would turn out to be numerous public lynchings of Muslim men charged with the transportation of cows or the consumption of beef, accused by the lynch mob of hurting Hindu sentiments (Burke 2015; Kumar 2017). By early 2016, the government’s preferred means of tackling dissent was to call its opponents “antinational” and to encourage them to “go to Pakistan.”6 It is in this context of an aggressive Hindu nationalist politics and a sharpened attack on Pakistan that the politics of this memorial must be located.
The war memorial in Kutch was dedicated to viranganas, “brave women,” who had participated in the war with Pakistan in 1971. This event brought into the public eye the three hundred Patidar women from Madhapar village, who had gathered together to repair an airstrip bombed during the 1971 war.7 This was an interesting theme to have structured a memorial to war. As a district on India’s western border with Pakistan, residents of Kutch have not been immune to either of the two wars fought between the two countries in 1965 and then in 1971. The memorial enjoys high visibility, located along the main eastern highway, and is called the virangana smarak (memorial to brave women) dedicated per its inscription to the “bravehearts of 1971.” In the form of a roadside installation, it is a tableau with eight sculpted figurines, six of which are sari-clad women. They are engaged in the construction of an airstrip under a canopy of three model IAF aircraft.
In choosing the 1971 war as the inspiration for the memorial and further by dedicating it not to territorial conquest or victories but instead to the memory of laboring women, the invocation of the virangana by the defense minister pushed the memorialization of war and its nationalist appropriation outside the strictly “military” into the realm of the domestic and the maternal. The most well-known contemporary attribution of the virangana is in Bangladesh, where the term birangona was used to designate Bengali women raped by the West Pakistani army during the Liberation War of Bangladesh, the very same war that started out as a civil war within Pakistan before India intervened in support of Bangladesh, thus becoming a combatant in the 1971 war and commemorated in Kutch by the virangana memorial. Unlike the forced sexual labor that the birangona was called on to perform during the war, which subsequently entitled her to the status of a freedom fighter, the Kutch virangana is ostensibly memorialized for the physical labor she performed during wartime, but the political appropriation of the viranganas made them into a symbol of Hindu nationalist pride by invoking them as mothers of the nation.
The official ceremony marking the unveiling of the memorial on August 27, 2015, constituted an important political and media spectacle in Kutch. Union ministers for Defense and Human Resource Development (HRD) came in from New Delhi.8 The latter minister—who in an earlier professional avatar was a hugely popular television actress and had played the role of a Gujarati housewife in one of Indian television’s longest-running soap operas—came dressed in a traditional red Gujarati tie-dye sari. Keeping her company were some of the viranganas themselves, dressed in white saris with tricolored borders symbolizing the Indian flag. Front-page news coverage of the event bore the caption, “Aavi mataon chhe tyan sudhi desh no bal banko nahi thay” (As long as there are such mothers, nobody can touch the country; literally, cannot push a hair out of place).9 The defense minister invoked the viranganas to pay tribute to Kutch, declaring that the region was the epitome of deshbhakti (patriotism) and narishakti (women’s power), whereas the HRD minister in her speech said that the memorial would now serve to inspire the rest of the country. The former also promised that a tank and jet actually used in wars with Pakistan during 1965 and 1971 would eventually be added to the memorial, an indication of the contemporary political significance of the memorial.
The mother and the heroic woman or virangana are of course not new tropes in nationalist imaginaries. Women have been integral to the way in which the nation’s body has been imagined: safeguarded both as the female body that must be protected against dishonor by the “outsider,” as well as the cartographic body. In India, this latter position is best exemplified in the iconic representation of the nation as Bharat Mata or Mother India. Pointing out that nationalisms are not only the products of a so-called liberal public sphere, Tanika Sarkar (2001) has argued that family and conjugality were important sites for the imagination of an anticolonial cultural nationalism in India. The questions of women’s chastity, morality, and domesticity became central to the formulation of Hindu nationalism from the nineteenth century onward. Charu Gupta (2001) argues that the nineteenth-century Hindi literary public sphere, constituted by advertisements, pamphlets, and other literature, helped consolidate and reconstitute conservative sexual moralities around the question of Hindu women and domesticity. The consolidation of a conservative morality around Hindu women enabled the construction of a Hindu nation with its iconic representation in Bharat Mata; she was simultaneously an agent of militant activism as well as a victim of the lascivious gaze of the Muslim man, against whom she must be protected. It was through the circulation of stories related to the abduction of Hindu women by Muslim men that Gupta (2001, 222) argued that “Hindu publicists used the figure of the victimized and the abducted Hindu woman to promote an identity agenda, emphasizing fear of a common ‘enemy.’ ” The figure of the virangana is a departure from the characterization of the woman as mother in that it layers the maternal image with that of a fighter. Kathryn Hansen (1988, WS-26) proposes the virangana model as one that is an “alternative female paradigm” to the bipolar narrative of wife or mother (goddess), “combining direct assumption of power with exemplary virtue.” Lindsey Harlan (1992) discusses the virangana as ancestral heroine and role model for Rajput women; here, women’s heroism lies not in mothering alone but in disregarding traditional conventions of gendered segregation and going outside the home to fight. Symbols of mothering also stretch to incorporate struggle and militancy, as Julie Peteet (1991, 107) argues in the context of the Palestinian resistance movement where such reworked symbolism became an important conduit for the politicization and mobilization of women. In the Palestinian intifada, she argues that women were able to reconstitute the meaning of motherhood so that it came to provide the contours of political activism for some women. “Reproductive and caring labor have acquired new public and militant meanings,” she argued (Peteet 1997, 107). Tarini Bedi (2008) suggests the optic of “adjustment” to conjure a female subject whose emancipatory prowess does not necessarily lie in any consistent or overt subversion of the “domestic.” As she points out in her study of Shiv Sena women in Mumbai city, the domains of kinship and politics are mutually intertwined, the one not necessarily in contradiction of the other.
The concluding sections of this chapter discuss how the viranganas themselves resist this heroic appropriation into a nationalist imaginary, choosing instead to focus on the work of military policing as everyday courage and labor and not just the subject of an extraordinary event like war. The memorial became an important public acknowledgment of the political symbolism of war and national security in this borderland at a time when a new right-wing Hindu nationalist government elected into office the year before in 2014, was seeking cultural-nationalist legitimacy across India. However, in the ensuing commemorations, there appeared to be significant dissonances between the significance accorded by the viranganas themselves to the nature of the wartime labor undertaken by them and the manner in which they felt the memorial had been appropriated politically by the state. Although the state invoked them as brave mothers of the nation, the viranganas I interviewed sought to relate their wartime participation in far more ambiguous terms. Their memories of participation in the war do not sum up neatly as the “brave woman,” “fearless mother,” or “nurturer” of the nation; in their narratives, the viranganas are fairly candid about their memories of a raw, painful, yet exhilarating time when they were consumed by doubt and fear and had to face the wrath and opposition of their families and the constant barb of being a “bad mother” whose service to the “military” was premised on an abandonment of their biological children. Love for the nation was not a predefined, preexisting state of being but something that was forged through the act of laboring at a bombed-out construction site, through the very physical and visceral experience of fear, exhilaration, and independence for women who found themselves in open contravention of their family’s—especially husband’s—wishes for the first time in their lives. The military-bureaucratic personnel became, in these narratives, their fictive kin who recognized them as their “sisters,” but the relationship that they describe has overtones of a relationship whose contours were far more ambiguous especially for young married women who worked in close physical proximity with men in uniform during an adrenaline-charged time. Unmindful of their families’ words of caution, these women compromised their physical safety and reputations as good wives and mothers to go out to work with the military men every day. Their narratives do not seamlessly map onto the official “virangana” story, which is a retrospective rationalization, in their view, for narrow political ends. The “true” meaning of deshbhakti, or service and selfless sacrifice, according to these women, was taught to them by the military. In the memories of some of the viranganas I interviewed, the category of the “military” is clearly the air force, but during wartime, this category stretched to accommodate an arm of the civil administration (such as the district collector). They make a strong distinction between their understandings of the “military” and the elected political machinery of the present, to which they attributed greed and self-aggrandizement at the cost of their labor.
In December 1971, India was at war with Pakistan, a consequence of its intervention in the latter’s civil war, fought for the independence of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan. The western border became, for a short duration, one of the theaters of war. I will return to the implications of military action on this border for the migration of Hindus from Tharparkar, Sindh, to Kutch during this period in chapter 5. Indian and Pakistani forces attacked each other and the Pakistani Air Force bombed sites in Bhuj, Okha, and Barmer (Rajasthan). Airfields, ports, and railway tracks or stations were frequent targets.10 The Bhuj air base was a strategic and vulnerable target, situated as it was just across the border. Bombing in Bhuj began on December 3; air raid sirens were sounded six times between midnight and the early hours of the morning on December 8. Between December 3 and 9, it was estimated that a total of 136 bombs fell, 64 of them on the night of December 8 and 9 alone, “reducing the runway to a rubble [sic].”11 In the ensuing panic, the town of Bhuj saw an exodus of citizens trying to seek shelter in safer areas. The district collector at the time, N. Gopalaswami, “hopped onto a motorcycle, announcing on a megaphone that people should not panic, but the exodus wouldn’t stop.”12 Depleted thus of its human resources, there was no labor available to undertake the task of rebuilding the runway. Building contractors who worked under contract for the air force refused to take on what they perceived as too dangerous a project. It was at this crucial juncture that, according to a news story in the Times of India, the sarpanch (headman) of Madhapar village offered the services of the women of his village: Behnon ko le aaun? (Should I enlist the ladies?)13
To understand this somewhat unusual offer, we need to understand the socioeconomic and family structure of Madhapar and its residents. The economy of this village, dominated by Patidars, was driven by remittances from overseas even in the 1970s. Men worked abroad and sent money home to their families, visiting them once every couple of years or so. Village households were constituted by elderly parents, their young daughters-in-law and children. These young mothers—most of them in their early twenties—worked as daily wage labor. Wing Commander Karnik recalls that even in 1971, the village boasted the distinction of having a refrigerator in every household and many car owners, including brands such as Mercedes.14 It is characteristic of Patidar villages even today that early economic prosperity has not dulled their relationship to manual labor. It was not uncommon during the tenure of my fieldwork to see Patidar women working with their hands in construction and other manual tasks even if they were reasonably well-off in the local context. It is this overall economic and familial structure of the village that may help us understand the circumstances under which large numbers of young women from Madhapar went out to work on the airstrip, rebuilding it in a record four days.15 The dedicated and fearless labor of these women was invoked as a “glittering example of patriotism and selflessness.”16 Their stance was compared by the then–prime minister Indira Gandhi to the heroism of the legendary queen who fought against the British, Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi, and most recently, the installation of the roadside memorial invoked them as brave mothers to the nation.17
However, as I argue here, the viranganas’ (also known in Madhapar as the “airport ladies”—airport vara behnon) recruitment into wartime activity was not necessarily a commitment driven by any overarching political or nationalist ideology. The women I interviewed talked about their work for the air force as a decision taken for them by the headman of the village in consultation with a contractor. Thus, they were not driven by nationalist sentiments to “volunteer” for this work; they were dispatched to work on the airstrip much as they were rounded up for any other construction-related work by contractors. This was simply what they did for a living and this was the way in which they got work, according to Viru, one of my “virangana” interviewees. Both Viru’s and Hiru’s narratives indicate that the role of motivating them with nationalist sentiment and the implications of the work they were doing for the nation (desh nu kam) was played by the “military” (expanded to include the air force and the district collector of the time). It was the “military” rather than the family that deserved credit, in their opinion, for their heroism and himmat (courage, strength) that they were able to develop under trying circumstances. Even though the “military” encouraged them (and later gave them due respect—this was an important source of acknowledgment for them), the biological/affinal family tried to prevent them from taking up this “unmotherly” role and abandoning their children. The viranganas’ participation in the task of rebuilding the airstrip, an activity that required their presence on the battlefield, open to the risk of attack, was significantly premised on a critical absence of male kin, this role taken over by the “military.” The contemporary elected state government in charge of the taluka and panchayat offices was derided by them as selfish; the politics of the virangana memorial was something they viewed as none other than political corruption. Finally, they brought to their work for the military qualities that were not offshoots of their domestic labor such as caregiving or cooking (e.g., Hewamanne 2013) but significantly in contravention of these qualities. They were reminded on a daily basis by their mothers-in-law of their duty to their infant children as they set out to work every morning. Their fathers-in-law reminded them of their commitment to be dutiful daughters-in-law (vau) in the absence of their husbands who toiled in distant lands to earn for the family.
Viru’s and Hiru’s responses to their memorialization through the virangana smarak in Madhapar enable a complex reading of the relationship between civil and military domains forged in an everyday register of hard work, dedication, and bodily discipline. Military men are rendered in this narrative as brotherly figures who stick by the Patidar women in their physical labor, inculcating in them a military ethic of bodily discipline, strength, and courage that is forged through highly grounded actions of work rather than as a transcendent masculine heroism. Their conversations on the subject ranged across a variety of themes, including the organization of the family with absentee husbands at its heart, the “unshackling” from patriarchal obligations that this enabled (albeit not without struggle), and the manner in which they were almost accidental recruits into the task of rebuilding the runway.
Yet the motivation and discipline they required for work performed under enormous tension and pressure were attributes that they did not put down to any innate feminine or motherly quality—such as patience, fortitude, or sacrifice—but firmly handed over to the “military” men who stayed with them as they worked, who constantly encouraged them: “It was just work, work, work, all the while we were at the site; no talking, no time to eat. The military men kept urging us on to work and work without stopping. They said, ‘Jaldi ho jayega, desh ka kam hai’ [It will finish quickly; it is work for the country]; what will happen if Pakistan drops another bomb? What will you do? Just keep working. And so, we did.” And finally, they refer also to the effects of nation-building through the very tactile and physical bond that they developed with military infrastructure during wartime, the impact of the bombs on their eardrums, the hot water that scalded their tongues as they drank to quench their thirst, and the absence of machines that made their task all the more strenuous. Every day, they had misgivings: “Every evening when we returned home, we said to each other, ‘This is truly dangerous work; let’s not return tomorrow.’ But then, every morning we found ourselves back at the site, drawn by the voices of the military men who stayed by our sides as we worked, who were repeating constantly in our ears, ‘This is for the desh [country]; it is desh nu kam [work for the country].’ ”
These affects—a sense of connection to the military forged through a shared recognition of what it means to be physically and viscerally involved in the gritty task of policing the borders of the nation, ensuring that its citizens could “sleep in peace at night” (chain ki neend), formed the core of the intimacies that developed between these women and the air force. This affective relationship to the military is a far cry from the superhero type of hyperbole that marks the state’s commemoration of both the BSF—through the posters it commissions—and the viranganas who are marked as sacrificial mothers; the latter is received by a deep ambivalence: “What did we know of the nation or even of motherhood?” commented the women who were now mothers to adult children. Hiru was twenty-two years old in 1971. Her husband, like Viru’s, worked in Nairobi. “In those days, there were no mobile phones to keep in touch. We communicated via airmail with our husbands. My husband wrote to me forbidding me from embarking on this work,” Hiru explained. “By the time the letter reached me, we had finished!” she declared triumphantly. Begoña Aretxaga (1997) argues that because women’s political practice has an interstitial character, it allows for greater social and feminist transformation. These Patidar women were housewives whose work outside the house on construction sites was subordinate to patriarchal authority of their parents-in-law in the absence of their husbands who worked overseas. Even their decision to enter the war was not framed as an agentive choice (it was the contractor who sent them to the airstrip). Yet the sense of independence they developed appears to have continued into the present. My first meeting with Viru was marked by the serendipitous nature of many fieldwork encounters: I was taken to her home by a mutual acquaintance who knew of my interest in the “airport vara beheno.” I arrived, thus unannounced at Viru’s home at that time of the mid-morning when most homes are temporarily calm and quiet, the kitchen taking a very brief respite in the aftermath of breakfast preparation and consumption and before women settled down to the serious task of lunch preparation.
In this brief lull, markets are visited for fresh produce or vegetables haggled over and bought from a passing vendor; neighbors might drop by for a quick chat or consultation. Viru had just made a cup of tea for her husband who was reclining with the newspaper, enjoying the comforts of a retired life. She welcomed us in, without missing a beat poured us all another round of tea and then introduced her husband who nevertheless did not seem interested in local history. Viru indicated that he was hard of hearing and that I should not be offended. The discussion that followed was led entirely by Viru and, once Viru summoned Hiru on the phone, by both women.
Viru began by recounting the context for me. “He [pointing to her husband] was in Nairobi at the time. Look [dekho], we are Patels; most of our menfolk worked abroad anyway. He used to come home to visit every couple of years. I was about twenty-five to twenty-six years old at the time. I looked after my saas-sasur [parents-in-law] and children, two sons and a daughter. In those days, we had no kheti [agricultural work]. So all the women were like that; we used to work in majduri [manual labor]. The contractor used to subcontract the work to agents, and they used to gather women—as many as they could find—and give us work. This was how we used to get work.” Both Viru and Hiru denied any active nationalist sentiment that drove them to work for the military. They were used to working as daily wage earners in various construction projects, but war was a different matter altogether. Hiru continued, “Eighteen bombs were thrown by Pakistan: four of them fell on the airport runway, some fell on the Khari Nadi road in Bhuj, near the airport, some fell on a field in Mirzapar killing a cow and a calf. The runway needed urgent repair. The contractor for the air force refused the work, saying, ‘It will take three/four months at the very least; we’ll see how it goes [dekhten hain].’ The people of Mirzapar village were approached for help, but they refused. Collector Gopalaswami, along with the military people [militarywala] approached the panchayat [village council] in Madhapar. Our sarpanch [headman] at the time, Jadhavji Shivji Hirani, agreed to help the military. All of us formed a group and went to work; there must have been about three hundred of us.” Viru added, “There were some men in the group, too, but mostly it was women who went to work.”
They described the frenetic pace of the work as well as the tense atmosphere that surrounded them both at home, with their terrified mothers-in-law holding the fort, and at the airport. “The family was totally against the idea; my mother-in-law begged me not to go,” emphasized Viru. Hiru added, “I was only twenty-two years old.… We used to leave the house at 7:00 a.m. and returned home at 7:00 p.m. The children were left at home with our mothers-in-law to look after. My sasuma [mother-in-law] beseeched me to reconsider. ‘If a bomb falls and kills you, who will be mother to your children?’ she would say to me with tears in her eyes.” They were constantly made aware of their husbands’ absence at home and the fact that had they been around, they would have prevented them from going out to work because they were abandoning their children. “We did it for the military … and for Gopalaswami [the district collector].… He had tears in his eyes when we finally completed the work; he said we were like his sisters. Did we not owe them our loyalty and our hard work?” Viru asked.
Every evening, they vowed to not return the next morning, and yet the morning found them once again at the site of the runway, working harder than they ever had. The men from the military stood by them, telling them what the war meant and how they should protect themselves at the site. Most of all, the men motivated them to work harder and faster so that their work for the nation (desh nu kam) could be accomplished without delay. Viru explained, “The runway had these three big craters [gadhha] where the bombs had fallen; we repaired only those, not the damage done to the sides.” Then Hiru held up her fingers and said, “In four days, we made the runway, can you imagine? … The military people told us, ‘When you hear the siren, it means a bomb will fall.’ So when we heard the siren, we’d duck into the twenty-five-foot-long trenches along the sides.”
The theme of bodily discipline and motivation to work—a military ethic that they owe to their brief apprenticeship with them—recurs across their narratives; this was at the behest of the military who urged them to work without stopping: “We had no time even to take a food break. We used to pack our food from home in the morning and bring it with us. The Swaminarayan temple in Bhuj contributed food every day: they sent sukhdi [a semolina-based sweet] and fruit for each of the four days we worked.18 But there was no time to even stop to eat; they [the military supervisors] did not let us stop. We just took our kholis [here, Viru demonstrated by holding the end of her sari out to make a small pouch], dropped the food into it, and in this way, we kept working and eating, working and eating, not stopping, not stopping.”
Working on the runway also led to a very visceral and literal bodily contact with the materials and effects of war along with the military men. “The sound of bombs—it was really ear-splitting; you felt as though your eardrums [kan ka parda] would just burst!” And further, “all the work was manual; there were no machines at all in those days! There was a horse-drawn cart [ghoda gadi], and even drinking water came in large canisters; it was so hot, it burned our mouths! The contractor provided all the implements we needed—cement mixer, pavda, ghamela, etc. When we put the reti [sand] on the road, the chemical stung our eyes so badly with its fumes; still, we worked and worked, worked without a break.” When air-raid sirens sounded, they climbed into trenches to protect themselves from bombs and then found that the trenches “were covered with desi bawal. It was so thorny that our faces and arms got badly scratched and bloody.… We just kept praying silently to ourselves ram … ram … and we remained safe; nothing happened at all.”
At the end of the entire ordeal, they returned home safe and sound. They were shaken and had a whole new set of experiences to assimilate. Viru summed up the experience in the following words: “Saraswati mata gave us budhhi [intelligence], Bharat mata gave us shakti [strength], and Ram gave us raksha [protected us].”19 Hiru was more forthcoming. Dressed in a sky-blue sari with silver sparkles all over, she strode into Viru’s living room, a sheaf of papers under her arm, which contained a record of all the women who had worked on the runway, their names and photographs attached. More confident and articulate than Viru, I discovered that she was also very angry about the new virangana memorial. “After the runway work was completed, the collector came to meet us. He had tears in his eyes when we refused to accept payment for our services because for us this was our service to the country and the nation [desh nu kam; rashtra nu kam]. He said, ‘You all are my sisters.’ We assured him that we would happily step forward again if needed.”
The above narratives contest the view that women’s recruitment into discourses of nationalism, war, and militarism are primarily forged within the idiom of nurture and sacrifice, as represented in the figure of the mother. Viru and Hiru strongly contest the political appropriation of their wartime labor in service of the nation as sacrificial mothers alone. For them, consciousness of and love for the nation (desh; deshbhakti) was inculcated by the military, forged through the physical labor they provided for the military during wartime. In turn, they seek to make a distinction between the military-bureaucratic complex and the elected political government; they hold the latter responsible for capitalizing on the viranganas for political gains, using the trope of motherhood and sacrifice in order to do so.
In thinking more broadly about discourses of securitization and women, Viru’s and Hiru’s narratives show us how so-called ordinary women can become integrally a part of military apparatus during war but in a role that challenges their contribution in terms of giving birth to and nurturing the male soldier alone.20 How did “regular housewives” become involved in the development of the military infrastructure during wartime, and how do they regard their role as “viranganas,” the designation accorded to them by the state through the inauguration of a war memorial honoring them? As seen above, their narratives resist any easy assimilation into a broad or homogenous “nationalist” discourse; in offering their physical labor for the nation during wartime, they were not driven by love or sacrifice for the abstract nation, nor were they performing quintessential acts of mothering such as nurturing or caregiving to soldiers fighting on the battlefront. The figure of the virangana was, as they saw it, an ambivalent figure and a work in progress, actively produced by the military, aided through the very tactile, visceral, and back-breaking work of building wartime infrastructure. Further, the role they attribute to the military commends them for their everyday heroism rather than only superheroic feats.
Although the viranganas refused payment for their work, the air force felicitated them on “Air Force Day” (October 8, 2014), when a cash award was handed over to the headman by a representative of the Air Force Wives Welfare Association (Regional).21 This grant was used to construct a second story above the village panchayat’s main office in Madhapar. Called the Virangana Bhuwan (mansion), it was dedicated to the spirit of their work. They also received a commemorative plaque from the air force, now placed in the village high school. Although Viru and Hiru were full of praise for the district collector and the IAF in the manner in which they motivated them to undertake this difficult and dangerous task, they expressed anger and disappointment over the politics of the memorial inaugurated in 2015. Vehemently denouncing the memorial, Hiru cried out, “Have you seen it? It says Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan; yeh to Bharat ka ho gaya, virangana behenon ka kya? (This has made it India’s memorial, what of the virangana sisters?).”22 She continued, “Where is the kisan [farmer] in this? We put in the labor and we undertook the risk. We did it for the military. Now these local politicians put their names ahead of ours. At the inauguration ceremony of the virangana smarak, elderly women, some of them with walking sticks, were made to sit on the floor, while this woman [she named one of the district-level politicians whom she alleged was central to the hijacking of the memorial for its political gains] who was not even born in 1971, sat up on the stage! I wanted to ask her, ‘Did you take a photo of what was happening while you were in your mother’s womb? You have no idea of what happened at the time and you are taking away all the credit!’ ”
Both women reiterated that even though the collector of the time and the military had given them a lot of respect and courtesy, the local political parties and village administrative machinery (panchayat, taluka panchayat) had only insulted them (apman kiya). The memorial, which in effect was dedicated—as they saw it—to some abstract nationalist principle, was the last straw. “Hamne lohi pani ek kar diya aur sab kuch airport ko de diya, aur ab yeh hamara apman karte hain” (We have combined blood and sweat and given our all to the airport and now they insult us). When I asked them what they would like, Hiru said, “We never wanted money; our only demand is that our names should be listed publicly on the memorial so that when we are gone, our children have something to remember us by. Some ‘Jai Kisan’ doesn’t work for us [koi Jai Kisan se kam nahin chalega]. I have a memento [that was given by the IAF at the felicitation ceremony] that they [the headman and local politicians] wanted to take away and install in the panchayat office. I dared them by saying, ‘First you go and show that you have the courage [himmat] to do this work and then you can keep all the mementos you like.’ These people are just making money out of our hard work [hamare nam pe paisa kha rahein hain].… They call us brave mothers, but this is military work, not mother’s work!”
Himmat—courage and strength—are qualities of mind and body that they absorbed from the military, borrowing from their work ethic. This was the military ethic that was infused into them through the men in uniform who steadfastly stood by their side throughout that dangerous time unlike those who are now trying to appropriate their experiences for political mileage—some of whom were not even born at that time. For these viranganas, it is the military who understands the value of their work and courage and has rewarded them appropriately. In return, they applaud the military for what they see constitute the true elements of national pride: hard work and endurance under pressure, rather than empty political slogans alone. They resist the claims made on their bodies by the nation in service of its Hindu nationalist aspirations that seeks to anchor security in women as mothers. Their comments are a strong indictment of the 2015 memorial and the manner in which, they argue, the political machinery of the state has stakes in the memorial that are quite distinct from the “military” and civil administration of the time as it honed their courage (himmat) and instilled in them the contours of patriotism.
This chapter suggests that despite its projection in a heroic or spectacular (and very masculine) mode, the work of policing also constitutes hard physical labor and requires qualities of mind that are not innate but forged in connection with the materiality of the work that is done. Women who constituted military labor during wartime remind us of these qualities that they too partook of in their close interactions with the military. This chapter tells us that interactions between women and the state’s military-security apparatus are not always coercive, but they are also not always forged within a gendered idiom of sexuality, care, domesticity, or mothering alone. It is crucial to be mindful of the social composition of those who are able or invited to merge their interests with the military. For example, Nira Yuval-Davis (2013) urges us to be conscious of the specific ways in which racial or ethnic minorities may be deployed or excluded by the military. The migrant “Bengali” and Muslim women discussed in chapters 3 and 4 are far more likely to be constituted as objects of policing than the Hindu viranganas of this chapter. Although hailed as brave mothers and heroines of war through the trope of the virangana as in the instance of the unveiling of a memorial to their wartime contribution, the viranganas do not see their contribution to the nation only in being a good mother and nurturer of male soldiers but also in the gritty task of building the nation’s infrastructure. The virangana inhabits the nation viscerally as she inhales the fumes of shrapnel in the aftermath of shelling, feels the reverberation of the bombs that the enemy nation drops and scalds her hands as she rebuilds what is destroyed by the enemy during wartime. In doing so, she is also paying homage to the military man who shares these experiences with her and distinguishes him from the civil political establishment that seeks political mileage from war. Being a good patriotic woman is premised here not on staying at home as virtuous woman or even as the militant mother but on transcending the limits of home, in defiance of the family and abandoning her children. In doing so, she forges a visceral connection with the nation as her body bears scars for the war and she labors under the gaze of uniformed officers. The “state” itself is further disaggregated into constituencies such as the military and the civil administration, not all of which are necessarily evaluated in a similar manner.