Fearless Freedom Page 2

  लेकिन घुट-घुट कर मरना भी

  क्या जीना?

  घर-घर में श्मशान-घाट है

  घर-घर में फाँसी-घर है

  घर-घर में दीवारें हैं

  दीवारों से टकराकर

  गिरती है वह

  गिरती है आधी दुनिया

  सारी मनुष्यता गिरती है

  हम जो जिंदा हैं

  हम सब अपराधी हैं

  हम दण्डित हैं ।

  She wants to live

  But what kind of life is it,

  To have to fight to breathe free?

  In every home are funeral pyres

  In every home the gallows loom

  In every home are prison walls

  Crashing against the walls

  She falls.

  Half the world falls

  All humanity falls.

  We who are alive

  We are all guilty

  We are all condemned.6

  Custodial Confinement

  Is it an exaggeration to speak of women’s homes as prisons, to use the word ‘custody’ to describe them as being in ‘judicial custody’ or ‘police custody’? Aren’t most homes cherished by women as a place of privacy, safety and comfort?

  To answer that question, let us take a look at some of the stark facts about Indian women’s lives in their homes. The latest National Family Health Survey 2015–16 (NFHS-4) found that just 41 per cent of Indian women aged between fifteen and forty-nine are allowed to go alone to the market, to the health centre, and outside the community (NFHS-4, Table 15.13); 26 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men thought that a man would be justified in beating his wife if she went out of the house without telling him (NFHS-4, tables 15.14.1 and 15.14.2).

  Do women from Dalit and Adivasi communities have greater freedom of movement than women of the dominant castes? The NFHS-4 findings don’t support this widely held belief: there is very little variation amongst women of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and ‘other’ castes when it comes to being allowed to go out of the house.

  Another study, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), made a distinction between women being able to go out alone and women having to seek permission to go out, finding that:

  [B]etter educated women make more decisions in the household and are able to go to more places on their own; however, there is less evidence that they can go without asking for permission from someone in the household. Similarly, women working for pay or working in a family business can make more household decisions and can go to more places on their own, but again there is no significant relationship with whether they can go out without taking permission to do so.

  The IHDS also found that:

  [T]here are surprisingly few differences among women in different social groups. Dalit and OBC women do have more freedom to leave the household by themselves, though surprisingly, this freedom of movement does not extend to Adivasi women. There are no measurable differences between Hindu, Muslim and women of other religious minority communities. Also, caste differences are not found in the case of the more private household empowerment measures of decision-making and women having to ask permission to leave the house.7

  The NFHS-4 found that young and never-married women were subjected to the greatest restrictions on movement: older, married women gained more freedom of movement, but still, just 55 per cent of women between the ages of forty and forty-nine enjoyed such freedom. It’s likely that the restrictions on women loosen as they age, because the burden of their household labour is likely to have shifted in good measure to a younger woman—a daughter or a daughter-in-law, who is also the subject of intense surveillance and control.

  If you think education makes for greater freedom for women, you are wrong. Education contributes only marginally to freedom of movement: 42.9 per cent women with no schooling and 45.3 per cent women with twelve years or more of schooling have freedom of movement (NFHS-4).

  What do these facts and figures really mean?

  They translate to a life lived ‘crashing against walls’, like a bird caught in a closed room, battered by every attempt to escape and fly free.

  There’s really no way to dress up this life and romanticize it as ‘safe’, as the only life where one’s ‘honour’ is safe.

  It means that young girls and women grow up under almost-total surveillance, denied even the mere dream of privacy. It means that newly-wed brides are even more confined when they are married into faraway homes: like migrant labour just arrived in the city, they are isolated, unable to draw on their friends and familiar neighbourhoods.

  This does not mean that these violent homes are not ‘loving’ homes: the point is that love, concern and caring do not automatically translate into respect for autonomy and personhood. The love is for the idea of the daughter or sister or daughter-in-law—and that love may turn into violence if the woman and her choices fall foul of the idea of what she is expected to be.

  Such intense and obsessive confinement of women is not ‘safety’. It’s time we recognized it as violence in its own right. The cautionary tale of the ‘Lakshman rekha’ distracts us with the fear of the evil Ravana lurking in wait if women breach the ‘circle of safety’ at their doorstep. It makes us forget that to be confined within four walls is to be prevented from living life fully, to be condemned to the suffocating existence of a caged bird.

  Violence against Women’s Autonomy: Disguised as ‘Rape’

  The everyday violence against women’s autonomy becomes most acute when young women fall in love in violation of the Lakshman rekha fault lines of caste and faith. We hear of these crimes only when the woman and/or her lover/husband are killed and the media describes it as an ‘honour killing’. But the fact is that such violence is acute even when it stops short of a killing. Such killings take place when other forms of violence intended to prevent such relationships and marriages fail. There is no available public record of such violence. But it hides in plain sight—and one way to spot it is to take a close look at rape-case statistics.

  In 2014, The Hindu tracked 583 rape cases decided by New Delhi’s district trial courts in 2013. Its findings were startling: over 40 per cent of ‘what is classified as rape (in Delhi Police files) is actually parental criminalization of consensual sexual relationships, often when it comes to inter-caste and inter-religious couples’.8

  Take a moment to absorb that fact. Let me break it down for you. Rape is a sexual act committed in violation of a woman’s consent: the only basis for a rape case involving an adult woman has to be that she says she was subjected to a sexual act without her consent. When an adult woman’s parents file complaints of rape, the police should not register a case of rape. When the matter is one of love between two teenagers of similar age, too, women’s groups strongly express the opinion that such relationships should not be classified as statutory rape, even if one or both are below the age of eighteen. They argue strongly that a distinction needs to be made between a much older adult having a sexual relationship with a minor girl between the ages of fifteen and eighteen (such cases ought to qualify as statutory rape), and love relationships between two teenagers without much age gap. But the Parliament in 2013 caved to a media-orchestrated moral storm and raised the age of consent from sixteen to eighteen, thus automatically criminalizing young love and branding all young love as ‘rape’. In a society where inter-caste and interfaith friendships and love face violent opposition, the age of consent as defined in the rape law now strengthens the hands of the patriarchs who brand ‘love’ as ‘rape’. To make the point even more clear, let’s recognize that parents who may be eager and willing to get their daughters, aged between fifteen and eighteen, married to boys of their ch
oice (that is a boy from an approved caste and community) in violation of the law that prohibits child marriage, will accuse a boy their daughter loves of her own choice of being a rapist. How can the law refuse to make a distinction between the two instances?

  The violence faced by the girls and women in these cases is not ‘rape’—it is violence that remains unnamed, unrecognized and can even pass off as ‘rescuing our daughter from rape’. The Hindu described the violence behind these ‘rape’ statistics:

  In two-thirds of the cases, the supposed ‘victim’ girl or woman ‘deposed consistently before the police, doctors, magistrate, district judge and under cross-examination that she had eloped and had sexual relations—and in most cases got married and sometimes had children—with the accused because she was in love with him’. In all these cases, ‘girls depose about the suffering they faced at the hands of their parents—beatings, confinement, threats, being forced to undergo medical examinations, abortions—even as they plead before the court they be allowed to stay with their husbands. A large number involved inter-caste and inter-religious couples’.9

  In all the remaining cases, the girl or woman ‘deposed in at least one instance—either in the initial FIR, or during her medical examination, or in her statement to the magistrate—that she was in love with the accused and went away with him of her own will. However, in court she supports her parents’ and the prosecution’s case’.10

  How does she change her mind? If she is kept in a shelter, she is often prevented from meeting or having any contact with her lover’s or husband’s family. Instead, she is allowed only to meet her own parents and family, who exert continuous pressure on her. If she is sent home, the violence inflicted on her in the custody of her parents’ home—beatings, confinement, threats and forced abortions described by the girls/women in two-thirds of the cases—break their will.

  The study by The Hindu said:

  In case after case, as well as in interviews with The Hindu, the behaviour of the girls’ parents was shocking: they arrive at the hotel the couple has eloped to and drag them home, they beat and even injure the couple (in one case breaking the girl’s spine), they threaten her even with acid, they force her to submit to invasive medical tests and in many cases, even to an abortion.11

  Unfortunately, the law—as drafted by patriarchal parliamentarians ignoring the pleas of women’s movement groups based on their vast and long experience on the ground—refuses now to allow judges to make any distinction between young love and statutory rape. It has chosen to validate the violence against girls’ and women’s autonomy, and brand love as ‘rape’. The law and the judiciary also turn a blind eye to the evidence of horrific violence meted out to women and girls in parental or community custody, and in fact offers itself as a tool to regulate and control the sexuality and autonomy of girls and women, and disguise such regulation as rescue from rape. Even in cases involving adult women, the judiciary has, on multiple occasions, betrayed that it shares the patriarchal anxieties about daughters’ choices, especially when these anxieties are compounded by a growing climate of Islamophobia.

  For LGBTQ persons, as for women, the parental home can easily become a prison as soon as they exercise their personhood and sexual autonomy. Very often, the judiciary and judicial systems work to discipline and punish, rather than respect and defend their autonomy and sexual orientation and gender identity. A recent study documented a case in Chennai, in which a lesbian woman was held captive inside her home by her parents. The woman’s partner filed a petition asking for the woman to be produced in court. Asked by the judge if she preferred to stay at home with her parents or go with her partner, the woman clearly declared that she would like to join her partner. The judge, instead of respecting the woman’s decision, referred to her as a ‘person with different values’, and sent her to a government-run ‘shelter’ home for women, to think about her decision. In the next hearing, the detention had had its effect: wishing to avoid prolonged incarceration in the ‘shelter’ home, the woman opted to go back to her family, and the judge promptly ‘allowed’ her to do so.12

  Likewise, in Kerala, a woman was held captive by her family to prevent her from living with her partner, a transgender man. The latter approached the court, and in court the woman clearly said she wished to live with her partner. But instead of ensuring that she was free to do as she pleased, the judge replaced the parental custody and captivity with the captivity of a government-run shelter home, where she remained for a long period. Only when she refused to let the incarceration break her will and stuck to her position in repeated court appearances did the court finally agree to let her join her partner.13

  It appears that the patriarchal ideology of guardianship is deeply entrenched even in India’s judicial apparatus. Sudha Ramalingam, a human rights lawyer who has been involved in several such cases, said that in these cases, ‘There is no Constitution, no law, only morality.’14 The judges tend to uphold the dominant, patriarchal, casteist and homophobic ‘morality’ rather than the law and the Constitution, when it comes to the autonomy of women and LGBTQ persons.

  Respect for Personhood

  A woman is a person, not the property (however loved and cherished) of the family or the community. Why is this concept so hard to grasp? The clue to the answer lies in the fact that in any given society, our emotions are shaped and trained in large part by social and economic structures. We are not born expressing ‘love’ for our partner through bouquets of roses or jasmine flowers; or for a daughter or sister through aggression towards their boyfriend. These are ‘structures of feeling’ that we learn.

  In India, caste underpins social, economic and emotional structures deeply. Caste—an oppressive hierarchical structure—plays a huge role in determining where we live; who our neighbours are; who our schoolmates are; who our friends are; what work we do; and, of course, who we marry. And to maintain caste, it is crucial to control women’s sexuality: any expression of sexual choice by a woman poses a threat to the caste system.

  Historian Uma Chakravarti writes that Brahminical patriarchy has for long regarded women of upper castes as ‘gateways’ into the caste system—requiring careful surveillance to preserve upper-caste purity—and this ‘obsessive concern with policing female sexuality’ has become a stubborn feature across caste groups, enjoying widespread approval and consent.15 When women exercise free choice in sexual matters, writes Chakravarti, ‘the whole social fabric seems to suffer a terrible tear’.16 Choice is also infectious—a woman who chooses her own partner is also more likely to demand a share of her ancestral property, and this explains in part why the granting of legal inheritance rights to women has increased the violence against women’s marriage choices in Haryana.17

  Shaped by Brahminical patriarchy, parents and brothers learn to express ‘love’ for and ‘duty’ towards a daughter or a sister by surveilling her and controlling her movements. Sadhana Subramaniam’s film India’s Forbidden Love: An Honour Killing on Trial, which was part of the ‘Witness’ documentary series on Al Jazeera, focused on the trial of the parents of a woman called Kausalya for the murder of her husband, Shankar, who was hacked to death in public for being a Dalit man who married a woman from a dominant caste. Two juxtaposed scenes in this documentary say a lot. Kausalya, transformed by the brutal murder of Shankar into a crusader against caste patriarchy, is watching the news when the verdict is being announced—her father has been convicted but her mother and uncle have been acquitted. With two of the accused free, Kausalya knows that her life is in danger—they have been threatening to kill her as well. As the ticker on the TV screen reads ‘mother acquitted’ she turns around and says to the channel’s reporter, ‘Who edits your news? Tell them not to say “mother”, call her by her name.’ The next scene is in Kausalya’s parents’ home, where her mother is recalling, with a smile and obvious fondness, how Kausalya knew only how to cook dosai: ‘When I was sick, she would cook dosai for me.’ Her mother then says that she had warned Kausa
lya, ‘If you betray us, fall in love and elope, I’ll kill you.’

  Our society, as it stands now, produces the emotions felt and expressed by Kausalya—her love for Shankar, her fierce determination to fight for social change even by risking her own life. It also produces the emotions felt by her parents: of ‘shame’ and ‘hurt honour’ and murderous violence as a way of redeeming lost social status. Which emotions will we choose to nurture and stand by: the love and courage of defiant sons and daughters, breaking the barbed-wire boundaries of caste, faith and enforced sexual orientation and heterosexuality, or what the poet Alok Dhanwa called ‘kuleenta ki hinsa’ (the violence of the high-born)?18

  Kaliyug, Caste and Disobedient Women

  In the Hindu imagination, Kaliyug is the degenerate and apocalyptic modern era: a ‘world turned upside down’ marked by the breakdown/inversion of class, caste, gender, age and other hierarchies. In Hindi and north Indian popular culture, the modern and sexually autonomous young woman who disobeys and defies her parents and elders is the most well-recognized symbol of ghor Kaliyug (terrible Kaliyug).

  To understand the extent to which women’s sexual autonomy is seen in India as threatening to the social order, we must come to grips with the fact that caste has been—and remains—the foundation of that social order, to which women’s sexual autonomy poses a great threat. Kaliyug in Hindu mythology is quite specifically an age when the caste and gender order disintegrates—and this disintegration is seen in the dominant ideology as a calamity, not a beneficial event.

  The epic poem Mahabharata, for instance, has a detailed description of Kaliyug as a world turned upside down, marked by Sudras doing the work of Brahmins and vice versa, Brahmins being treated like commoners while Sudras demand and enjoy respect, Sudras refusing to serve Brahmins, disobedient women and ‘mixed marriages’ between castes.19