By Sukalpa Bhattacahrjee
Women, breaking silences either by writing or speaking and occupying public spaces has been always considered an anomaly. A woman’s being and body however has been the battleground for describing and legitimizing social customs and cultural traditions. In the context of India, the imagery of the nation, the project of modernity and the 19th century reformist agenda- all had to be enacted on the basis of patriarchal notions of women’s desire and her need for freedom without taking into account women’s consent: did the woman want to jump into the pyre of her husband and be a ‘virtuous’ sati ? Did every woman necessarily want to re-marry? Was marriage the only secure institution left for the woman of the sub-continent? Did the institution of marriage guarantee a life of dignity and freedom to women ? These are questions which nobody ever asked any woman, nor do most women ask themselves these questions even today. Historically, the “woman’s question” not only came to dominate public discourse for more than a century, it also became the touchstone of the colonial-nationalist encounter, inscribed with the trope of modernity and the legitimization of political power. For colonial rulers, the atrocities practiced against Indian women became a confirmation of the rulers’ modernity and the moral ground on which their “civilizing” mission could be launched. As outsiders they could claim the role of protector of Indian women, interceding on their behalf against brutal patriarchal practices like sati which they justified as “white men saving brown women from brown men”.
In a modernist configuration of the division between public and private spheres, gender division effectively “naturalizes” exclusions from public life. Gender division represents a complementary relationship that effectively produces, maintains, and reproduces individuals capable of acting in the public sphere through the labour of their counterparts who act in private, and thus lack access to the rights and opportunities of public individuals. Thus, gendered complementarity creates a category of “women” who are relegated to the private sphere and who, therefore, lack equal access to rights. The limitation in the universal Rights discourse is evident from the need for a separate Convention to take into account women’s human rights against the institutionalization of Human Rights.
If we ponder on the recent discourses on the issue of women’s rights and examine the social and political responses to the Delhi rape case, (from which we have not yet recovered and yet a seven year old has fallen victim to it last week), we find that social and cultural anxiety over issues of conformity and chastity with regard to women over ride the sense of anger and condemnation for the heinous act. The media reported shameless eloquence of public figures on why the victim did not address her violator as a brother or how girls could be protected in school against their predators by wearing a veil. While the civil society registered their protest through candle marches and their demand for the implementation of Justice Verma Report, did the social and political unconscious of the Nation address the issue of why the public streets are forbidden areas for women at nine o’ clock in the night? Why is that neither the state nor our social institution of patriarchy are capable of protecting or honouring our right to bodily integrity and yet both can legitimize their agenda on the body politic of the woman. Gendered analyses has shown that the maintenance of patriarchal ideology requires production of certain spaces as male domains and female domains. It is the politics of spatial usage that determines its power. The (under)representation of women’s body and experiences in social, political and institutional spatial structures constitutes the basis for gendered exploitation and violence. Ironically, the assignment of gendered spaces is saturated with meanings and ideologies which tend to shape and condition even the women’s sense of her(self). Demarcation of spaces are also constructed through the operation of patriarchal ideologies in social and cultural realms and through state-sponsored political propaganda in art, public images and media. For example if one recalls how the sixteen year old girl was assaulted on the prominent street of Guwahati in 2012 and the kind of questions that were posed to her by the media persons (actually actors of the plot) , pushing the girl towards the microphone, it would not be difficult to understand that the point was not that her bodily integrity and freedom as a would-be citizen was being violated but that she was coming out of a bar at ten in the night, which is considered to be a social and cultural blasphemy.
Contemporary discourses on the relationship between sexual violence and the political economy of violence also needs to be reconstructed on the basis of the politics of gendered distribution and exploitation of female bodies in space. Recent studies on this issue show that both insurgents, terrorists, army and average male actors justify “the type of violence i.e. rape, torture, murder, cannibalism and the intended targets of violence i.e. sexual violence against pregnant women, or elders, resulting in oppressive agency in situations where the victims’ autonomy, choice or control over their situation is greatly circumscribed. Authors like Janie L. Leatherman opine that “taboo violation is central to the culture of patriarchy itself” and male eroticization of the forbidden, for “[d]oing something that is prohibited and getting away with it demonstrates one’s power much more fully than [does] doing something acceptable”. The condition of women under AFSPA can be interpreted from this perspective. Therefore, Hyper-masculinity and warring masculinities create insecurities for women and dominance among competing hyper-masculine groups need violence to be inscribed on women’s body. One can interpret the in human Godhra incident, particularly the raping and burning of the pregnant woman, Kausar Bano in the light of this. The woman’s body bears the markers of her own community as well as the fears and suspicions against her community. Her identity determines how her body will be restricted and curtailed by her own community and also determines how she will be targeted when the ‘other’ community wants to teach her community a lesson. In both instances the statements the body is used to make is not in the woman’s control. Her body is used to make statements about her caste, class and communal honour. For example the church by asking women to veil themselves in church or during Holy Communion or insisting on the cloistering of nuns as symbols of Christian and Roman Catholic identity, Islam asserting the veil as basic to Islamic religious identity, Hinduism insisting on the vermillion, mangal sutra, bangles and coloured and white saree as signs of their cultural Hindu identity of married and unmarried women – all of this assert the disciplining of women’s bodies and controlling their lives in the guise of it being the religious, cultural or national identity. It is this underlying principle that is aggravated during times of conflict. This is the main reason why brutalization and rape of a woman in times of war or conflict becomes also a symbolic act by the males in warring/conflicting groups to insult the honour of the man/ clan/ religion that a woman belongs to.
There are many other silences that need to be broken. But have women found the appropriate language of resistance? Can women realize the de masculinisation of their own minds and speak the unspeakable, especially the subtle forms of violence prevalent in the lives of educated, elite and urban sections of women. It is a more difficult task to unveil the camouflage of the sophisticated and intellectualized jargons of the educated, self proclaimed emancipated patriarchs who lead an amphibian existence –one of cannibalistic instincts in the private space of the family and of utter denial of this in public spaces and projecting oneself as the votary of peoples’ rights movement. I conclude with a recent incident where one of my female colleagues asked the leader of one of the largest student’s organization of the region in a seminar last week, as to why there was not a single woman occupying any portfolio in the organization even after the fact that many women sacrificed their life for the organization. The leader simply shouted her down and said-‘Madam , your allegation is not based on facts’ without having the mind or honesty to find out why she observed so, herself being a distinguished academic and citizen of the region. I feel like quoting Kamala Das Surayya,”I am a million million silences/strung onto someone else’s song…’
(The author teaches English at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong and can be contacted at [email protected])