ABSTRACT
As the freedom struggle intensified, both the Indian Congress and the Muslim League increasingly mobilized along lines of religious community identity; even the theme song of the National Indian Congress Party was selected from a tale of Hindu anti-Muslim struggle. There was little effort by either community to forge a national secular culture. Since the vast majority of the leadership came from upper-caste Hindu backgrounds, Hindu religious culture was effortlessly equated with Indian culture. In a process of ‘resacralization’, modernity, instead of separating the secular from the sacred, drew the two together into a new synthesis (Uberoi, 1990). Women from the two communities came to symbolize two distinct faces of the nation: the bold Hindu woman with her face uncovered, wearing the national dress of the ‘traditional’ sari, marching for the nationalist cause, and the burqa-clad Muslim woman excluded from public space by her community who seemed suspended in a web of religious conservatism (Mazumdar, 1992:6).5
