Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

Situating India

Jyoti Atwal, Iris Flessenkämper

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367898274
• eBook ISBN: 9781000639230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Social Sciences

This book covers a range of issues and phenomena around gender-related violence in specific cultural and regional conditions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it discusses historical and contemporary developments that trigger violence while highlighting the social conditions, practices, discourses, and cultural experiences of gender-related violence in India. Beginning with the issues of gender-based violence within the traditional context of Indian history and colonial encounters, it moves on to explore the connections between gender, minorities, marginalisation, sexuality, and violence, especially violence against Dalit women, disabled women, and transgender people. It traces and interprets similarities and differences as well as identifies social causes of potential conflicts. Further, it investigates the forms and mechanisms of political, economic, and institutional violence in the legitimation or de-legitimation of traditional gender roles. The chapters deal with sexual violence, violence within marriage and family, influence of patriarchal forces within factory-based gender violence, and global processes such as demand-driven surrogacy and the politics of literary and cinematic representations of gender-based violence. The book situates relevant debates about India and underlines the global context in the making of the gender bias that leads to violence both in the public and private domains.

An important contribution to feminist scholarship, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women's studies, history, sociology, and political science.

Part I
Introduction

Situating India

Challenges and propositions

Jyoti Atwal

As I pen the introduction to this book, India is witnessing an extraordinary revolutionary moment for gender relations ranging from upheaval in the form of the #MeToo campaign to the demand for justice for brutally raped and murdered minor girls. According to Section 375, Indian Penal Code, man is said to commit ‘rape’ when he has sexual intercourse with a woman against her will.¹

Legally, the scope of defining gender-based violence has expanded in the last decade. In the workplace, various forms of sexual harassment have become a punishable crime since the 1997 Vishakha judgement guidelines were implemented. This has empowered women in institutions and offices to report cases of lewd remarks, lecherous looks, and sexual advances of their male colleagues/bosses. While the #MeToo cyber campaign has reached rural India, the issue of ‘authenticity’ of charges against the accused is a debated matter. However, such campaigns have made Indian women aware of various forms of power and hierarchy that are central to male-female relations.

Interestingly, India is simultaneously witnessing a violent campaign by conservative men and women against women’s entry into Sabarimala temple in South India.² According to the recent Supreme Court verdict, the doors of the shrine were declared open to all women, irrespective of their age.³ The anti-women’s temple entry group asserted the claim that only those women in the non-menstrual age group, i.e., under 10 or over 50, could be permitted entry. The power of tradition remains strong despite the Supreme Court verdict and the temple authorities backed by conservative groups continue to deny women entry. To protest against this forced exclusion, women in Kerala very recently formed a 620 km (385-mile) human chain ‘in support of gender equality’.⁴

In several Hindu families, menstruating women had been secluded from religious activity as per Hindu traditional practice, but at the same time there exist other traditions that celebrate the onset of puberty/fertility in women. The obsession with pure and impure bodies is a mythological construct but acquires a form of violent resistance to any reform once it is played out in the politico-religious context. These events can be explained by the idea of a shared normative universe, extended by R. Mahalakshmi in the section on historical encounters of this book and in Adelheid Herrmann-Pfandt’s article on the depiction and normalisation of violence in Indian cinema.

In terms of gender violence and representation: in late 2017, North India witnessed incidences of violence over the release of the film Padmaavat. The cultural vigilante group called Rajput Karni Sena had called for a ‘janta curfew’ on the day of the release of the film. The film is based on a sixteenth century epic poem written by Sufi poet Malik Mohammed Jayasi, where the Muslim Khilji Sultan falls for Padmavati, the beautiful Hindu Rajput queen of Chittor. The Sultan challenges her husband, King Ratnasen, to battle. The king loses and is killed by the Sultan. In accordance with the warrior caste custom ‘to preserve honour’ of the dead king and her kingdom, Queen Padmavati performs jauhar or self-immolation. Other courtly women who lost their husbands in the battle also follow her into the fire.

While the Karni Sena was protesting over the bollywoodisation of Queen Padmavati, after watching the film, feminist scholars and activists set out to make a strong critique of the glorification of jauhar by Padmavati in a 15 minute climax.⁵ One might choose to dismiss this film as a period film, which simply represents what might have been a ritual/custom of the times. Knowing that every representation is a political act, we may situate the issue in the larger context of what socio-political forces guide such cin imagination. Joshi and Josh have argued that societies of the medieval times that lived by the ‘symbolics of blood’ – the masculine art of governing ‘ethical virility’, ‘sexual virility’, and ‘social virility’ – were fused together to constitute this specific discourse of lust and power.⁶

While such moments of glorification of women’s sacrificed bodies allow conservative and regressive groups to inculcate a fake sense of confidence and control over the past, for a democratic and diverse country like India, such occasions also rekindle debates on gender equality, the right to life, and the need to strengthen law against present-day gender violence.

Gender-based violence in India is also a result of a collective social bias against inter-caste marriages/relationships. Non-conformist partnerships/sexualities often produce an individual/social anger, which is directed towards both men and women. This has often led to murders (or honour killings) of young girls and boys, especially in the rural context.⁷ In a recent case in Gaya on December 31, 2018, police solved the case mystery of a brutal killing of a 16-year-old minor girl.⁸ Her body was found beheaded and mutilated. She had apparently eloped with someone but when she returned in a few days, her furious parents planned her murder with the help of a butcher friend.

Some notable cases also pertain to metropolitan areas. One such example of a cold-blooded murder (honour killing), of a 23-year-old photographer, comes from West Delhi. He was stabbed and his throat was slit on a busy street. The murderer was allegedly the father of the 20-year-old girl who the victim was soon to marry. The victim, Ankit Saxena, was kicked and punched repeatedly by the girl’s father and uncle before the former stabbed him and slit his throat using a chopper and a knife while her two other relatives held his arms.⁹

In two separate cases of suspected honour killings in Western Uttar Pradesh, a newly married couple were put to death in Mainpuri while a young girl was shot dead by her brother in Aligarh. In Mainpuri, bodies of a young couple, Birbal Jatav and Sulekha Shakya, were found hanging from a tree on the outskirts of the village of Jaisinghpur on Saturday morning. While in Aligarh, 32-year-old Nasir allegedly killed his younger sister, Rani, 18 years old, for having eloped with her neighbour, Aasif, 22 years old.¹⁰ Issues of societal non-conformism and violence is well explored in this volume in Manju Ludwig’s chapter on the cases of punishable deviant sexuality in colonial India and in Renate Syed’s chapter on Hijras in contemporary India. Same-sex relationships are also taboo in India but recently the Supreme Court ruling overturned a 2013 judgement that upheld a colonial-era law, known as section 377, under which gay sex is categorised as an ‘unnatural offence’. According to the latest verdict, consensual adult gay sex is not a crime and article 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution contradict the present view of Section 377.¹¹

In her introductory section chapter, entitled ‘Researching gender-based violence in India: issues, concepts, approaches’, Iris Flessenkämper argues that sexual violence against women is in fact a recurrent theme in communal riots, as is the complicity of state and police actors in concealing religiously motivated assaults against minority women.

The other type of violence is located within the politics of class and space. Dichotomies such as rural-urban/middle class-labouring class tensions can be applied to understand the Nirbhaya rape case of 2012. Nirbhaya and the urban middle class context is further explored in Susmita Dasgupta’s chapter on public transport and the Nirbhaya rape and murder case of 2012 in this volume. This murder case shook India like never before. Recently a rape and murder case more brutal than that of Nirbhaya has been reported. A class twelve student was the prime suspect in the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl, whose semi-naked, mutilated body was found near Budhakheda village of Haryana’s Jind district.¹² The girl’s body was found with her private parts mutilated and liver ruptured. The police confirmed that she was kidnapped by more than one person, who prevented her from making noise. The girl had injuries on her face and inside the mouth. The autopsy suggests that this was an act of frustration. All the damage to her private parts seems to have been done after she was drowned and murdered. This was the work of more than one person who failed to sexually assault the victim while she was alive.

Another aspect of rape is intertwined with the caste of the female victim. According to the National Crime Records Bureau report for 2015, the national rape statistics of Dalit girls/women have gone up by 15.41%. However in the state of Haryana the increase was 167%. Prem Chowdhry has pointed out how the rape of Dalit women is a punitive tool for ensuring social subordination of the lower caste to the upper caste.¹³ Vivek Kumar in this volume explores the seldom-researched topic of the use of abusive language against Dalit women.

This volume ‘situates’ India but simultaneously seeks to address the phenomenon of gender-based violence beyond the conceptual binaries of East versus West/modern versus traditional/colonial versus post-colonial, etc. While this volume ‘situates’ India, it also acknowledges and underlines the significance of the global context in the making of gender bias leading to violence both in the public and the private domains.

In Münster (Germany) in 2013 when Iris and I met in a cafe and discussed the aftershock of the horrendous Nirbhaya rape and murder case in German and Indian media, it struck us that gender violence is as much a global phenomenon as it is an Indian one. While the Western media had seized an opportunity to make a spectacle of the ‘Orient’¹⁴ ‚ we were determined to address the issue of gender violence by focusing on a variety of networks or scales (the local, the national, and the colonial/global sphere). To address these scholarly anxieties we organised a workshop on “Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives” at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi between the 22nd and 24th of September, 2015. It drew together researchers from Germany and India to investigate the relationships between gender and violence in India from interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume is the outcome of brainstorming on the historical, transcultural, and comparative aspects of gender-based violence in India and the world. Our initiative on cross-cultural research was also triggered by a series of developments across the globe. The global rise in the level of violence against women in both the public and the private sphere has encouraged feminists to reach beyond their national boundaries.¹⁵ Yet, it still remains very difficult for many women to report violence within the domestic sphere. Furthermore, female victims are discouraged from taking legal action, as they are pressured instead to seek reconciliation with perpetrators. The varying degree of willingness to make a criminal complaint or even talk about violence makes it difficult to gain a complete picture of the situation. However, crime statistics, surveys, and reports of activity from international political institutions, support agencies, and non-profit organizations allow us to measure the scale of human rights abuses of women. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates ‘that overall, 35% of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence’ in their lifetime.¹⁶ Some national violence studies show that more than 60% of women have experienced physical violence (irrespective of the perpetrator) at least once in their lifetime and more than 50% in the last 12 months before the survey.¹⁷ Violence against women does not exclusively involve physical assaults; rather, it is a multifaceted phenomenon also involving different forms of social discrimination that deprive women of their opportunities to develop themselves, to realise their potential, and to share equally in social goods.

Some statistical notes

The traditional roots of gender-based violence continues to be very strong in India even though younger men and women have attained considerable levels of education and form a significant proportion of the workforce in India. This phenomenon gets complicated when global forces work their way into local economies and cultures. It might be useful to look at some statistics. This section with statistical notes from India is rooted in the question of intersectionality raised by Christa Wichterich in her chapter in this volume. She revisits the issue of economic globalisation, which, she argues, as a mode of mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Historical encounters and cultures of violence
• PART III Minorities and marginalised women: sexuality and violence
• PART IV Economies of violence and cultural representations
• Index