A robust feminist politics that resolutely says no to this war remains the need of the hour. At the same time, such a rejection of war-mongering, that predicates itself both on Islamophobia and a deeply problematic patriarchal politics, must stand on a larger rejection of the sindoor symbolism and politics in everyday life. Yet, embracing such a feminist politics right now, is to risk being called an “anti-national,” writes Poonam Singh.

On April 22, 2025, a visual that had gone viral shook almost the entire subcontinent and became the symbol of the Pahalgam terror attack in which 26 civilians were shot dead. The photograph, by now a familiar visual artefact, shows a young woman crying over the corpse of a man who had been killed by the terrorists. Later, the man would be identified as Vinay Narwal, a lieutenant in the Indian Navy. The woman, we would get to know, is Himanshi Narwal, his wife. They had been married only a few days before their fateful honeymoon trip to Kashmir. Like most catastrophic events in human history, there is no single narrative strand that can tie all the stories of the Pahalgam massacre together. Yet, like all massacres, the manner in which it was conducted – singling the men out, asking them to recite the kalma to figure out if they are Hindus or Muslims, and then selectively killing the Hindu men – there is indeed a common string that binds all the victims together. Consequently, the massacre has also left behind many bereaved women – daughters grieving for their dead fathers, wives grieving for their dead husbands. And, of course, children grieving for their dead fathers. 

In this web of collective grief, Himanshi’s story stands out. 

It stands out, precisely because the retaliatory military attack launched by India after a fortnight on May 7, 2025, hitting nine terror targets in PoK and Pakistan’s Punjab province killed at least 26 persons there (the casualty figure has been revised upward, though it is difficult to ascertain the exact death toll), has been titled “Operation Sindoor.” Sindoor, or vermilion, as it is often called in English. That red powder that is the duty of every Hindu wife to adorn her forehead with. That red powder that becomes the symbol of marriage for the Hindu wife. That red powder which comes to the Hindu married women both as a form of  daily ritual and labour. That red powder which informs the world that her husband is alive and kicking. That red powder that informs the world that she is “blessed,” because what can be a better kind of luck for a Hindu woman than to be married? 

The significance of the sindoor, in India, of course, is multi-faceted and complex. For one thing, it has often been transformed into a powerful trope in Bollywood and other local popular cultures. In such representations, sindoor, almost always symbolizes a woman’s chastity and her happiness. However, when read against the grain, sindoor, also becomes a cultural object that is almost always associated with the everyday social and moral policing of the married woman’s body. It is not impossible, for example, to bump into discussions, often undertaken by women themselves, on the “best” ritual practices of wearing the sindoor. Unmistakably, the sindoor operates as a powerful cultural artefact, granting upon the Hindu married woman a form of social sexual respectability. Of course, embedded within that socio-sexual effect of gendered respect and respectability, is the understanding that a sindoor wearing woman is someone else’s property, and therefore, cannot be violated easily. A Hindu married woman can, of course, be violated by her husband and his family. The very existence of the sindoor on her forehead, means that such violations, when undertaken by the husband or his family, are to be borne in silence. 

This is what the sindoor grants the Hindu married woman then – a kind of fragile socio-sexual respectability in exchange of life-long subservience and silence. The sindoor, then, not only becomes a mark of chastity for the Hindu married woman, but also the all-embracing symbol of her consent to be subservient to the Hindu patriarchal order. For, the sindoor is always uni-directional – always conferred upon the woman by the man. Thus, in the sindoor-wearing ceremony of all Hindu marriages, the man is always the subject, putting the sindoor on the woman, who becomes the passive surface which is thus marked – the quintessential object. If, then, the sindoor marks the married Hindu woman in irrevocable ways, the married Hindu man continues to be unmarked, his body devoid of any marks of his being “taken.” 

The term “Operation Sindoor,” then, creates a cultural narrative. The cultural narrative that is already in place in Indian society and popular culture. In the nation’s history, no military operation has possibly carried forward the gendered tropes of the popular film industry with such vehemence and conviction. In that cultural narrative, remains embedded are all the ramifications of the sindoor discussed above. And, that’s precisely why it has been named as such. 

Yes, “Operation Sindoor” is the name of a military operation being carried out by India to avenge the Pahalgam terror attack. In that, like any other military operations or wars, it is far more than just a cultural narrative. But, it is also a war whose consent has been acquired through the construction of a cultural narrative. And, that cultural narrative, in profound ways, is a masterstroke of the Hindutva-fascist aesthetics. 

This cultural narrative, as is evident, is profoundly gendered. It is profoundly gendered in the way the visuals and posters of the Operation that are being circulated from the official state sources, make use of the sindoor ka dabba – the little container in which the red powder is often kept by the married women. An artifact of the Hindu domesticity, an inextricable element of the Hindu wife’s domestic assemblage of objects, the sindoor ka dabba has been transformed into a public spectacle in these visuals. Not only have they been made public, but they have been turned into symbols of the state, the symbols of the Hindu Rashtra, so to say. In that, the deployment of the sindoor ka dabba not only reinstates the Hindu Rashtra, which has now become synonymous with the Indian state, inside the Hindu domesticities and the women’s world they accommodate therein, but also turns the Hindu domesticities into microcosms of the Hindu Rashtra itself. 

In doing so, it invokes the memory of Himanshi Narwal’s photograph — the image of Himanshi leaning over her dead husband, the image of the woman who has just been widowed. There is a political continuum here. If the terror attacks in Pahalgam and the terrorists who have killed her husband, have been operational in making her a widow, and in making her a widow have also wiped off the traces of the “auspicious” vermilion powder off her forehead, then, the Hindu Rashtra becomes the saviour. The saviour who, through the war – the “Operation Sindoor”, so to say – will give back the aura of the sindoor to the hapless Hindu widow. Even if that act of giving back is only metaphorical in nature. It is in that metaphorical act, which involves the very real act of destroying lives, that the Hindu Rashtra constructs its own brand of nationalism. 

It has been argued by the feminist theorists of nationalism that nationalisms, historically, have often predicated themselves on male pain. Yet, if one looks closely at the cultural narrative of “Operation Sindoor,” the kind of nationalism that it propagates, stands on female pain. This war, to be precise, is being fought on a state-sponsored sentimentalization of female pain. As has been reported by India Today, “The operation’s name – Sindoor, the vermillion worn by married Hindu women – was a deliberate invocation of grief, memory and resolve.” One might add, “of female grief, female memory and male resolve.” Yet, that female pain, too, has been meticulously defined. There is only one kind of female pain that has been acknowledged – the pain of widowhood. Furthermore, widowhood, here, too, has been painstakingly defined. The only kind of widowhood that deserves to be acknowledged is the one where the Hindu wife’s Hindu husband has been killed by the Muslim terrorist. To be precise, female pain in the name “Operation Sindoor” comes to be defined extremely narrowly, and this narrowing has been undertaken with a political purpose. 

And, that political purpose is to attain several erasures. Erasure of the fact that Muslim, and more specifically, Kashmiri Muslim life has been lost in Pahalgam too. Undoubtedly, the communal undertone of the Pahalgam massacre is to be condemned severely. Yet, the symbolism of the sindoor does not necessarily accommodate the grief that the Kashmiri ponyhandler Syed Adil Shah’s death in the same terror attack, has caused his family and community. In the same way, the grief that has been caused by the Bengali Muslim havildar Jhantu Ali Sheikh’s death at Udhampur, cannot be accommodated within the symbolic deployment of the “sindoor,” and thus, stands objectively erased. 

However, there is also another kind of profound — and, to a certain extent, far more potent — erasure that Operation Sindoor undertakes. The erasure of the Hindu married woman who refuses to adorn herself with the sindoor. To refuse sindoor as a Hindu married woman, is to commit a kind of gendered blasphemy that tantamounts to a refusal of all that sindoor in Hindu patriarchy stands for. A Hindu married woman, who, then, refuses to adorn herself with the sindoor, is always dangerous. Not only does she raise questions about the cultural-religious symbols of patriarchy, the patriarchal traditions of marking women’s bodies as possessions, but also raises a far more fundamental question about her own belonging. Does the woman who refuses to adorn herself with the sindoor remain Hindu at all? Has she not created a profound distance between herself and the Hindu religious community? 

A woman who does so, always rouses patriarchal suspicion. The suspicion that makes her erasure and obliteration an imperative. 

However, the social media theater that has unfolded ever since the declaration of “Operation Sindoor”, has revealed, that, indeed, there are women who would problematize the very significance of sindoor. And, some of them, also happen to have Hindu-sounding names. One can think of Vaishna Roy, the editor of Frontline in this regard. Most of these women had been viciously trolled by the Rightwing Sanghis for expressing their opinions thus. For, the larger politics of the sindoor, with its inbuilt and embedded aesthetics of acquiring women’s subservience, cannot imagine women born in Hindu families to be political agents. Political expression, for Hindu women, are supposed to be confined to the service they can render to the Hindutva’s agenda.  

A case in point is the vicious online attack that Himanshi Narwal faced, when she boldly claimed that she does not want the death of her husband or the Pahalgam terror attack to become a pretext for  violence on Muslims and Kashmiris. If Himanshi’s photo with her husband had provided the starting point of the sindoor politics, which would culminate in the naming of the war as “Operation Sindoor,” her statement had indeed disrupted that very sindoor politics. And, it is precisely this disruption that the Hindutva brigade desires to erase. One might even say, it is precisely this disruption that they are scared of. 

The sindoor politics, then, initiates a different phase of Hindutva nationalism’s gender politics. If its earlier feminized icon had been that of Bharat Mata, it’s new gendered icon is the widowed wife, whose grief must be avenged. Needless to say, that avenging must come with the obliteration and decimation of Muslim and Kashmiri bodies and lives. If the earlier image of the Bharat Mata was completely de-sexualized and de-eroticized, the current image of the widowed woman who has lost her sindoor to terrorism, brings back eroticism to the Hindutva politics. And, it does so, by instituting the Hindu Rashtra not only as the protector of Hindu women’s bodily safety, but also as the protector and guaranteer of her marriage, sexual honour, legitimacy and chastity. In this act of safeguarding, the military becomes the most important state apparatus. 

In some ways, then, the Hindu Rashtra comes to operate as the Hindu women’s proxy husband. And, in assuming the role of the proxy husband, the Hindu Rashtra also brings the Hindu women further into its fold. Of course, the gendered symbolisms of the Pahalgam terror attack itself are not to be missed. The selective killing of men in front of their wives and children, is, indeed an affront that is couched in the language of competitive masculinity. The very act of creating a community of grieving women, whose traumatic memories would forever remain tethered to the masculine aura of a gun-toting terrorist, reveals a sexual politics of ethno-nationalism that is as nefarious as the gender politics of the Hindutva brand of nationalism. Women’s lives, and more importantly, grief, are, then, supposed to exist, sandwiched between two groups of competing fundamentalists/terrorists, for both of whom, wife-hood sums up the essence of feminine life and existence. In this complex political continuum, the figure of the grieving widow becomes another kind of allegory — the allegory of the Sanghi popular political narrative of “Hindu khatre mein hain,” the allegory of a hyper-masculine, muscular nationalism that is best represented by the armed forces. 

Needless to say, a robust feminist politics that resolutely says no to this war remains the need of the hour. At the same time, such a rejection of the Indian state’s war-mongering, that predicates itself both on Islamophobia and a deeply problematic patriarchal politics, must stand on a larger rejection of the sindoor symbolism and politics in everyday life. Yet, embracing such a feminist politics right now, is to risk being called an “anti-national.” It doesn’t take a lot to understand that dissent comes with a cost, and such costs can increase manifold if one happens to be a woman. Consequently, if one had felt a sliver of hope at Himanshi Narwal’s earlier disruption of the sindoor politics, one also needs to be aware that she has, recently, on May 8, 2025,  “thanked” the government for “Operation Sindoor.” Yes, the status quo of the sindoor politics has been restored, the Sindoor Republic continues its work, and women continue to be integrated into the fascist project, thus leaving very little space for any kind of wishy-washy rhetoric that rests upon simplistic understanding of women being inherently anti-war or anti-aggression. Yet, the story would remain incomplete if one does not take into account the multiple female voices that have been outspoken in their opposition to the war. Women who have risked the safety of silence to speak up against what they think is wrong, even if their version of what is right, happens to be extremely unpopular at the moment.

(The views and opinions expressed in the article are personal)