Modi-Masculinity

Abstract

Media discourses—both independent journalism and advertisements—during the 2014 general election in India articulated a gendered focus on a significant aspect of Narendra Modi’s public representation relating to his forceful masculinity. His election campaign—as well as popular discourse that surrounded his pre-prime ministerial persona—significantly focused upon his “manly” leadership style: efficient, dynamic, potent, and capable of removing all policy-roadblocks through sheer force of personality. In this, he is implicitly counterpoised to Manmohan Singh, his “impotent” predecessor, and more generally against an “effeminate” Indian type who is unable to strike hard at both external enemies (Pakistan and China, say) and internal threats (“Muslim terrorists,” most obviously). His “56-inch chest”—able and willing to bear the harshest burdens in the service of “Mother India”—was a frequently invoked metaphor in the election. This article suggests that Modi-masculinity is a reformulation of older versions of Indian masculinist discourse in a time of consumerist modernity and that the media has played a significant role in the re-making. The discussion suggests that Modi-masculinity stands at the juncture of new consumerist aspirations, the politics of “Indian traditions” and gender, and the re-fashioning of masculine identities.

Keywords

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi media and masculinity consumerism in India Indian traditions

The gender politics of Indian modernity has primarily been traced through exploring discourses surrounding women. The female body and feminine chastity have had significant careers within feminist historiography as well as sociological and anthropological studies that seek to track the complex contours of power in the making of sociality. India-related scholarship has produced a rich body of work relating to topics as diverse as women as repositories of Indian traditions (Chatterjee 1993; Mani 1993; Sunder Rajan 1993), the nation as goddess (Ramaswamy 2010), televisual femininity (Mankekar 1999; Munshi 2010), women and Hindu nationalism (Bacchetta 2004; Chakravarty 1998; Sarkar and Butalia 1995), and women and new middle-class identities (Donner 2011).

Gender, however, has rarely been understood in its proper sense as a relationship: one between women and men, and between men, women, and various other genders. And yet, as a steadily accumulating body of work suggests,

A proper understanding of the field of power in which women have lived their lives demands that we look at men as gendered beings too: at what psychic and social investments sustain their sense of themselves as men, at what networks and commonalities bring men together on the basis of shared gender identity, and what hierarchies and exclusions set them apart. (O’Hanlon 1997, 1)

Hence, the study of female, male, and transgender identities concerns the exploration of power relationships within the contemporary gender landscape, where certain dominant ideals of manhood affect women, different ways of being men, as well those identities that may not fit either gender category. This way of engaging with gender is an exploration into the naturalization of the category ‘man” through which men have come to be regarded as ungendered and as the “universal subject of human history.”

Masculinity refers to the socially produced but embodied ways of being male. Its manifestations include manners of speech, behavior, gestures, social interaction, a division of tasks “proper” to men and women, and an overall narrative that positions it as superior to its perceived antithesis, femininity. The discourse of masculinity as a dominant and superior gender position is produced at a number of sites and has specific consequences for women as well as those men who may not fit into the dominant and valorized models of masculinity. These sites include customary laws and regulations, the state and its mechanisms, the family, religious norms and sanctions, popular culture, and the media. Indeed, transformations in the Indian media landscape over the past two decades (see, for example, Athique 2012) constitute the most significant context for the transmission, circulation, and reception of local and global masculine identities. With the extraordinary expansion in the number and forms of news, commercial and online media—and the concomitant rise of new technologies of communication—representations of masculinities find both local and global anchoring. In this sense, with the expansion in its public reach, the media has become a transformative force field with a capacity to influence Indian structures of belief.

The growing body of scholarship on masculinities in India constitutes a rich field of insights into the gendered fields of power across a number of social registers. Within the discourse of “colonial masculinity” (Sinha 1997), non-European men were represented as incapable of self-government due to their so-called effeminacy. Hence, kingdoms were annexed (for the sake of “better” governance), and natives were denied positions in local bureaucracies. Much more generally, non-European cultures were also “effeminized,” being represented as otherworldly, unfocused, unscientific, and so on. However, while some natives were feminized, others were represented as “martial” races (Nepal’s Gurkhas and India’s Sikhs, for example; Omissi 1991) and hence worthy of some respect. The “martial races” were frequently infantilized and represented as lacking intellectual prowess, and hence not equals of the colonizers. Historians have also pointed out that a “self-image of effeteness” (Rosselli 1980, 121) was widely accepted among nineteenth-century Indian (Hindu) intelligentsia; many came to attribute their ‘emasculated’ status to the long history Muslim rule, which had reduced Hindus to the status of a subjected population. This aspect is, as we will see, of continuing significance.

Contexts of postcolonial masculinities range across a number of registers. These include masculinities and caste politics (Anandhi and Jeyaranjan 2001), Hindu nationalism (Bannerjee 2005; Chakraborty 2011; Chakravarty 1998), celibacy and body regimes such as traditional wrestling (Alter 1992, 2011), quotidian subaltern masculinities (Osella and Osella 2006; Srivastava 2004), filmic cultures and young people (Derne 2000), and masculinity and the cultures of Rabelaisian “fun” at Hindu festivals such as Holi (Cohen 1995).

Building upon the above, we can analyze the 2014 general elections as a rich and prolix context for a focused elaboration of the otherwise dispersed popular discourses on masculinity. The deployment of “traditional” masculinity politics as a significant electoral strategy was as unprecedented as the role of the media during the elections. It was, however, the imbrication of the two that made the elections unlike anything in the past.

In particular, this article analyses the discourses of masculinity that gathered around the person of India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, a leading member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I suggest that though couched in the language of “traditional”—and corporeal—manhood, Modi-masculinity is a recension in a time of consumerist modernity, and I further suggest that media has played a significant role in this re-fashioning. Modi-masculinity stands at the juncture of new consumerist aspirations, the politics of Indian traditions and gender, and the re-fashioning of masculine identities. Some idea of the newness (and peculiarity) of Modi’s mediated image can be derived from the fact that his masculinity was, in fact, counterpoised to that of a political opponent, incumbent prime minister Manmohan Singh, whose ethnic identity as a Sikh positioned him in the ranks of the “martial races” (Omissi 1991).

Masculinity as Campaign Strategy

The elections were significant for the investments made by political parties in campaigning through various media. The dividends of such investment were recognized slightly earlier during the 2011 anti-corruption campaign led by the ex-bureaucrat Arvind Kejriwal. Kejriwal and his team successfully used traditional electronic as well as social media to garner massive support. Soon after joining Twitter in November 2011, Kejriwal gathered a following of 1.5 million. In 2012, he launched the Aam Admi Party (AAP), which gained unprecedented success in the state elections in Delhi in 2013. Kejriwal was chief minister of Delhi till his resignation in February 2014¹. In the general elections, the BJP’s sophisticated and massively funded campaign that centered around its prime ministerial candidate Modi showed that media management played an even greater role in elections. Modi was quick to set up his own website and establish a Twitter account. Of particular importance was his projected self in mainstream print and electronic news media.

As noted above, a significant aspect of the media discourse that gathered around (what was hailed as) Modi’s U.S.-style “presidential” campaign focused on his “forceful” masculinity. Modi’s election campaign—as well as popular discourse that surrounded his past persona—significantly focused upon his “manly” leadership style, identifying this as efficient, dynamic, potent, and capable of overcoming the “policy-paralysis” that had putatively afflicted the previous regime. In this, he was explicitly counterpoised to Manmohan Singh, who was portayed as his “impotent” predecessor, and more generally to an “effeminate” Indian type who is unable to strike hard at both external enemies (say, Pakistan and China) and internal threats (“Muslim terrorists,” most obviously). This aspect was reinforced by the BJP’s publicity machine’s metonymic invocation of Modi’s “56-inch chest”—able and willing to bear the harshest burdens in the service of Mother India—that gained mass currency through the media.

The following statement by fashion writer Shefalee Vasudev (2014) exemplifies the recognition that Modi’s image has been specifically crafted for the media:

If we can read nationalism in Modi’s dressing, Obama’s look is about accessible glamour, just as Kennedy’s was about spirited decadence. If Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi was the most garishly dressed politician in the world, former French first lady Carla Bruni was about Parisian sophistication and nonchalant sexiness. Each made a different statement.

As such, blogger Vrinda Gopinath (2014) recognized that masculinity was a significant aspect of Modi’s media image in specific ways:

Modi’s Empire Line is most flattering to himself—of opulent turbans adorned with pearls and feathers, rath chariots of gold and chrome, a machismo swagger with his self-proclaimed “chappan chatti” (56-inch chest), giant cut-outs in every street, to 3D virtual images that walks, talks and eats; mammoth road shows of pomp and pageantry; flashy showmanship and stagecraft at public meetings; it’s an intoxicating cocktail of hyper masculinity, virility, and potency. Good Grief, Narendrabhai does sound like a Mughal Emperor in Modern India!

Further, as sociologist and media commentator Shiv Vishwanathan (2013, 54) noted,

Originally Modi appeared in the drabness of white kurtas, which conveyed a swadeshi asceticism. Khadi is the language for a certain colourlessness. Modi realized that ascetic white was an archaic language. His PROs forged a more colourful Modi, a Brand Modi more cheerful in blue and peach, more ethnic in gorgeous red turbans . . . Hair transplants and Ayurvedic advice served to grow his hair . . . He senses he has to sustain himself as both icon and image of a different era.

The political valence of media discourses of “Modi-masculinity” was recognized by his opponents through their efforts to dispute it. Little by little, they cast their criticism in terms of his claims to “real” manhood. Hence, in October 2013, a Congress party minister told a Hindi newspaper that Modi could never become prime minister as he had not married and hence lacked manhood. (Actually, Modi is married, but has lived separately from his wife.) Then in February 2014, TV news reports showed leading Congressman Salman Khurshid referring to Modi as napunsak (impotent) for not putting a stop to anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. Masculinity came to be invoked to describe both personal and political choices.

Notwithstanding the “traditionalist” casting of the discussion—including invocations of family-life and virility—Modi-masculinity should, in fact, be seen as a specific effect in the times of consumerist modernity. While borrowing from pre-national and nationalist ideas, Modi-masculinity’s peculiar characteristic lies in its judicious presentation of Indian manhood as both deeply national (and hence territorialized) as well as global (and de-territorialized). Subsequently, it offers a model of choice that is based around the notion of “moral consumption.” Within this, there is no condemnation of consumption as illegitimate grounds of identity-formation (van Wessel 2004, 104) or emphases on the morality of savings-behavior (Srivastava 2006). Rather, the concern is with “appropriate” participation in consumerist activities. This has been the most significant manner in which Modi-masculinity has found articulation in the media.

Postnationalism and Modi-Masculinity

There are two specific contexts that are important for a fuller engagement with the meanings of Modi-masculinity. These are “postnationalism” and what I have referred to above as “moral consumption.” These concepts (or contexts) also allow for an understanding of the two (or, at least two) specific constituencies of Modi-masculinity that consist of territorialized and de-territorialized Indians. The former consists of older and newer (or, in Modi’s own terminology, “neo”) middle classes, whereas the latter refers to the Indian diaspora. Postnationalism is the articulation of the nationalist emotion with the robust desires engendered through new practices of consumerism and their associated cultures of privatization and individuation. It indexes a situation where it is no longer considered a betrayal of the dreams of nation-building to either base individual subjectivity within an ethic of consumption (as opposed to savings) or to think of the state’s statism in a context of co-operation with private capital (as encapsulated by public–private partnerships, say). The second term, moral consumption, is the site of a civilizational debate that seeks to accommodate older social identities—wife, mother, husband, son, sister, for example—within newer individualizing tendencies of consumerism. It does not constitute a rejection—or critique—of consumption (cf. Lim Chua 2014 and van Wessel 2004) but, rather, an attempt to locate the new forms of subjectivities (e.g., individualism) within existing social structures. In a parallel discussion, I have suggested (Srivastava 2011) that the commoditization of religious and ritual contexts allows for the situation where women can be both hyperconsumers (subjects of the world) as well as “good” wives (able to return home to “tradition”).

Modi-masculinity stands at the crossroads of postnationalism and moral consumption and, in this, combines the continuing imperatives of longstanding power structures and relations of deference, with newer political economies of neoliberalism. That is to say, it combines the idea of an Indian essence with the notion of global comity. Modi-masculinity is, in the most obvious way, the counterpoint to the political figure of the “Five-Year Plan Hero”—the idealized protagonist of the planned economic imaginary that held sway in an earlier “Nehruvian India”—of the 1960s and 1970s (Srivastava 2006) in as much as the former transcends both territorially defined notions of national identity and disavows “savings” in favor of consuming as an act of citizenship. In as much as Modi-masculinity presents the case for a dominant and domineering male figure who can forcefully champion the cause of “minimum government, maximum governance” (one of Modi’s favorite election slogans), he speaks to a middle-class constituency that has, in recent times, sought to disengage from state mechanisms (Jaffrelot 2008) in favor of private enterprise. Simultaneously, in severing the link between national identity and national territory—through the emphasis on globalised consumption rather than national savings—it addresses a diasporic audience. What is crucial in both cases is the irreducible nature of masculine power articulated through “Modi-ness.’ It gestures at and seeks to overturn historical “emasculation”—the social inability to deal with internal and external “threats” and the economic inability to be seen as “global” through disenfranchisement from the world of consumption—through discourses of gendered power.

Conclusion

Modi-masculinity offers not only the possibilities of worldliness but also the promise that men might continue to maintain their hold on both the home and the world. That is to say, in a post-industrial world, while both men and women are offered equal chances of becoming consumers, masculine anxieties over female consumption – the woman as the sacrificing figure who facilitated male consumption rather than consumed herself has been a long-standing cultural discourse – are, in effect, assuaged through Narendra Modi’s ‘strong’ masculinity. He takes part in the world of consumption while not effacing the world of “tradition.” He is the advocate of moral consumption; ergo consumption is good as long as it is “appropriate” to the Indian cultural context. In this way, Modi-masculinity, while aligned to an emerging discourse of “Enterprise Culture” (Gooptu 2014, 12), is not quite neoliberalism’s self-regulating, autonomous individual spoken of in analyses of neoliberalism in the West. What we have, instead, is an individualized subject who is encouraged to make (his) own enterprise, though not exactly as he pleases but, rather, through the dictates of social structures, such as family and kin networks. It is entirely proper, then, that recent television ads for personal insurance—a significant index of “subjectivity and sociality and neoliberal financing” (Patel 2006, 29)—in India present the high-achieving (and enterprising) child purchasing a policy not for himself, but for his aging parents.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Sanjay Srivastava is Professor of Sociology at Jawharlal Nehru University, Delhi. He is also Adjunct Fellow, Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne. His recent publications include Passionate Modernity. Sexuality, Consumption and Class in India (2007); Sexuality Studies (contributing editor, 2013) and Entangled Urbanism. Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon (2015). He is co-editor of the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology.

References

Alter

Joseph

. 1992. The Wrestler’s Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Alter

Joseph

. 2011. Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India. New Delhi: Penguin.

Anandhi

Jeyaranjan

2001. “Masculinities and Domestic Violence in a Tamil Nadu Village.” Research paper published by Institute for Development Alternatives, Chennai, India.

Athique

Adrian

. 2012. Indian Media. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bacchetta

Paola

. 2004. Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologues. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Bannerjee

2005. Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism and Nationalism in India. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Chakraborty

Chandrima

. 2011. Masculinity, Asceticism, Hinduism: Past and Present Imaginings of India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

Chakravarty

Uma

. 1998. “Inventing Saffron History: A Celibate Hero Rescues an Emasculated Nation.” In A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, edited by John

Mary

Nair

Janaki

, 243–68. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Chatterjee

Partha

. 1993. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Sangari

Kumkum

Vaid

Sudesh

, 233–53. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

10.

Cohen

Lawrence

. 1995. “Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity.” GLQ 2:399–424.

11.

Derne

Steve

. 2000. Movies, Masculinity, and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India. Westport: Greenwood Press.

12.

Donner

Henrike

. 2011. “Gendered Bodies, Domestic Work and Perfect Families: New Regimes of Gender and Food in Bengali Middle-Class Lifestyles.” In Being Middle-Class in India: A Way of Life, edited by Donner

Henrike

, 47–72. London: Routledge.

13.

Gooptu

Nandini

. 2014. “Introduction.” In Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India: Studies in Youth, Class, Work and Media, edited by Goptu

Nandini

, 1–24. London: Routledge.

14.

Gopinath

Vrinda

. 2014. “Does Narendra Modi’s Grand Image of Himself Come from His Roots, Asks Vrinda Gopinath.” Altgaze.com, December 24. http://www.altgaze.com/?p=753 (accessed February 21, 2015).

15.

Jaffrelot

Christophe

. 2008. “‘Why Should We Vote?’ The Indian Middle Class and the Functioning of the World’s Largest Democracy.” In Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China, edited by Jaffrelot

Christophe

van der Veer

Peter

, 35–54. New Delhi: Sage.

16.

Lim Chua

Jocelyn

. 2014. In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India. Berkley: University of California Press.

17.

Mani

Lata

. 1993. “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.” In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Sangari

Kumkum

Vaid

Sudesh

, 88–126. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

18.

Mankekar

Purnima

. 1999. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham: Duke University Press.

19.

Munshi

Shoma

. 2010. Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television. New Delhi: Routledge.

20.

O’Hanlon

Rosalind

. 1997. “Issues of Masculinity in North India History.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 4:1–19.

21.

Omissi

David

. 1991. “‘Martial Races’: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial India 1858-1939.” War & Society 9 (1): 1–27.

22.

Osella

Caroline

Osella

Filippo

. 2006. Men and Masculinities in South India. London: Anthem Press.

23.

Patel

Geeta

. 2006. “Risky Subjects: Insurance, Sexuality and Capital.” Social Text 89 (24): 25–65.

24.

Ramaswamy

Sumathy

. 2010. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham: Duke University Press.

25.

Rosselli

John

. 1980. “The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal.” Past & Present 86:121–48.

26.

Sarkar

Tanika

Butalia

Urvashi

. 1995. Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

27.

Sinha

Mrinalini

. 1997. The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

28.

Srivastava

Sanjay

. 2004. “The Masculinity of Dis-Location: Commodities, the Metropolis, and the Sex-Clinics of Delhi and Mumbai.” In South Asian Masculinities: Change and Continuity, edited by Chopra

Radhika

Osella

Caroline

Osella

Filippo

, 175–223. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

29.

Srivastava

Sanjay

. 2006. “The Voice of the Nation and the Five-Year Plan Hero: Speculations on Gender, Space, and Popular Culture.” In Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in Indian Cinema, edited by Lal

Vinay

Nandy

Ashis

, 122–55. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

30.

Srivastava

Sanjay

. 2011. “Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and the Moral Middle-Classes in Delhi.” In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, edited by Baviskar

Amita

Ray

Raka

, 364–90. New Delhi: Routledge.

31.

Sunder Rajan

Rajeshwari

, 1993. Real and Imagined Women. Gender, Culture and Post-colonialism. London: Routledge.

32.

van Wessel

Margit

. 2004. “Talking about Consumption: How an Indian Middle-Class Dissociates from Middle-Class Life.” Cultural Dynamics 16 (1): 93–116.

33.

Vasudev

Shefalee

. 2014. “The Wear Tear of the Modi Kurta.” Live Mint.com, June 14. http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/78cC1RJF8eGlUNBqnDPhqJ/Essay-The-wear-and-tear-of-the-Modi-kurta.html?utm_source=copy (accessed February 21, 2015).

34.

Vishwanathan

Shiv

. 2013. “The Remaking of Narendra Modi.” Seminar, no. 641:52–58.