In India today, violent communalism is pulling women into militant politics, particularly into the Hindu right. This book explores the supposed clash from legal, religious and political perspectives, and considers the questions and paradoxes that this provokes for feminism.

Feminism tends to identify women's political activism with emancipatory movements. Yet how can this view be reconciled with the current involvement of women in right-wing causes? In India today, violent communalism is pulling women into militant politics, particularly into the Hindu right. This book explores the supposed clash from legal, religious and political perspectives, and considers the questions and paradoxes that this provokes for feminism. It compares right-wing strategies and tactics with those of feminist groups, and considers the issue of violence, both against women and by women. It also examines gender and the Hindu right, including their relationship to religious processes, economic development, caste politics and constitutional crisis.

Women, legal discourse and the saffron agenda
Shiv Sainik and her sister Swayamsevika
women, Hindutva and the politics of caste in Tamil Nadu
militantly communal Hindu women in the RSS
endangered identities, gendered institutions and women's survival
testimonies of survivors from the anti-Sikh carnage of 1984
Hindu texts and women
Surat, Savarkar and Draupadi
legitimizing rape as a political weapon
redefining the agenda of the women's movement within a secular framework
responses of women's groups to communal violence
gendered imagery and real women of Hindu nationalism.