ABSTRACT
This chapter explores representations of Muslim women in the discourse of India's most extensive non-party Hindu nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS ideologues divide Muslim women into Pakistanis, Indians, and nationally undifferentiated Muslim women. The image of working Muslim women contradicts the RSS claim, expressed elsewhere, that they are confined in purdah because Islam and Muslim men oppress women. The RSS' motive was to divide Muslims along gender lines, and to use Muslim women to denigrate Muslim men. The RSS is fundamentally opposed to heterogeneity, autonomy and non-Hindu nationalist identities. In a variation on the theme, yet another RSS author assigns unbounded sexuality and immorality to Muslim women, when he claims that one-fourth of the population of Pakistan is composed of Muslim prostitutes. Their common denominator is the transgression of communal and / or sexual boundaries in the "wrong" direction.
