Faith, Honour, and the Futures We Choose: Reading Gender, Culture and Honour in Contemporary India

• The book review examines how honour norms continue to shape women’s lives in Punjab and Haryana despite economic growth and development.
• It explores how caste, religion, class, and community shape patriarchal control over women’s bodies, choices, and everyday lives.
• It considers how religion, culture, and social practices can be rethought to support gender equality, dignity, and well-being.

Is economic progress capable of challenging patriarchies?

Can it make unequal societies more egalitarian?

Or will economic growth ultimately offer alternative forms of existing power structures?

These questions fuel sociologist Rajesh Gill’s Gender, Culture and Honour: Gender Audit of Punjab and Haryana (2019). Through rigorous people-centred fieldwork conducted over six years in several villages in Punjab and Haryana, the book details how honour norms continue to structure the lives of women, even in the face of extraordinary economic growth in these two flourishing Indian states. At a time of intense focus on questions of faith, identity, and social change, Gill’s work serves as a welcome reminder that progress without justice hardly ever reverses deep-seated values.

The book’s strength lies in revealing the irony of prosperity. Punjab and Haryana have been the greatest beneficiaries of the Green Revolution, having been declared amongst India’s richest states over the decades. However, these gains co-exist with some of the worst gender inequities in India. Poor child sex ratios, limits on women’s physical mobility, incidence of domestic abuse, honour-based controls over female life and sexuality, and ingrained sexism in day-to-day interactions. Gill shows that economic improvement, in itself, does not displace patriarchy, but patriarchy moulds itself into a modern format.

When Honour Becomes a Social Order

Based on data collected from 2011 to 2017, Gill explains that it is not the economic statistics but the personal stories that matter. Women describe how concepts of honour influence their decisions in family matters related to marriage, schooling, travelling, voting, choices about family planning, and choices about their body. For these women, honour is not just a value but a means of social order maintained through the family and social networks organised by caste and religion. Gill takes pride in showing that one cannot understand the patriarchal control of women in rural India by separating it from the complex systems of power that govern their lives. 

The author analyses honour through multiple categories, including caste, religion, class and age, as well as governance systems that shape daily lives in rural areas. Through the intersectional analysis, Gill responds and adds to the wide feminist literature published in India since the late 1970s, in which it is shown that patriarchy in the country is not something one can discuss or understand separately from caste and community. It pushes us to ask difficult questions about religion and culture. In much of South Asia, what is often justified in the name of religion is actually a social practice rooted not in religious belief, but in convenient patriarchal interpretation. Research such as Gill’s has made clear how concepts of honour and shame attach to the woman’s body, while being at the same time supported and protected by social structures of community. 

As Gill writes, a social order emerges that is structured as though women have sole possession of the symbolic and ritual labour necessary to maintain the existence of social order and identity for any number of us.

Traditions, Social Contexts, and Personal Stakes

Indeed, many other books written today reflect this insight. Uma Chakravarti’s Gendering Caste (2002) continues to be essential in showing how maintaining caste purity rests on controlling female bodies and fertility. Bama’s autobiographical book, Karukku (1992), is an invaluable addition in revealing how the interplay of caste, religion, and gender is at work within Christian Dalit communities. Gill (2012), with her contribution along with these authors, points out that traditions remake themselves again and again as political and social contexts change. The same message has been forcefully conveyed in literary writing as well. 

Meena Kandasamy’s novel When I Hit You (2017) explores violence at the hands of an individual spouse and depicts it as not only a private domestic violence but as a projection of social practices allowed and normalised under the pretext of upholding familial pride and social standing. Perumal Murugan, in his novel One Part Woman (2010), writes a beautifully subtle and empathetic tale of how the norms and values around childbearing, marriage, and religiously guided rituals become inescapable when women seek release from expectations of their communities around reproduction.

Future of Religion and Gender Equality

Beyond the regional focus of Gender, Culture and Honour, this study holds up a mirror to several concerns facing present-day India and larger South Asia. 

What happens when the forces of economic growth outpace those of cultural change? Can faith communities play a role in justice and equality, rather than merely upholding outdated and unfair conventions? And how many cultures rethink honour less as female sexual restriction and more as devotion to dignity, equality, and well-being of everyone? It is impossible to disconnect the future of religion from that of gender equality. 

To become a catalyst for positive social change, religion will need to carefully reconsider many practices, which have unfortunately been mistaken for divine revelations. This is what Gill achieves. Her book reminds us that authentic progress occurs not only through economic development or legal reform but also through the determination to reframe the values that guide communities in understanding honour, participation, and fundamental human qualities.