Producing the Conjugal Patriarchal Family in Maulana Thanvi’s Heavenly Ornaments: Biopolotics, ‘Shariatic Modernity’ and Managing Women

Abstract

Written in the 1930s for Muslim women in north India by MaulanaAshraf Thanvi (1864Thanvi ( -1943, Bahishti Zewar or Heavenly Ornaments, has been influential in defining proper feminine etiquette and household management. The household type that is produced is nuclear and with a clearly defined male patriarch. The most mundane of tasks are outlined and related to religious duty. What is central to my analysis is how the meticulous details of household management, bodily comportment and etiquette articulate a regime not of repressive power but rather a (modern) productive modality of power that produce trained docile bodies (Foucault, 1975) and complementary gendered Muslim subjectivities. Thus the tropes Thanvi uses to produce a manual for the self-management of women cannot be divorced from certain logics of modernity and modernist reform; but instead of medico-scientific discourses producing women's subjectivity, Thanvi uses shariatic principles as the vector through which a modern vision of a managed patriarchal conjugal family infiltrates the household.