We have to lose our chains

Writer: Nihira
Editors: Akanksha, Amshuman
Artist: Nilima Sheikh, ‘The Husband, Sister-in-Law and Mother-in-Law Plot to Kill Champa, while She Dozes Battered and Exhausted from the Chores Given to Her, in the Kitchen’ 1984-85

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The life of a woman is cheap. Cheaper than movie tickets. The proof of our oppression is masked as entertainment, and then flung at our faces as education. If both entertainment and education are deemed mindless, what then? Where do we go? It has become difficult to think. There’s distractions to avoid, there’s genocide to not avoid, there’s work to be done, there’s life to be lived, there’s chores to be carried out, there’s you, there’s me, and there’s the world. But we must move beyond selling the few free moments we create for ourselves to movies produced solely to provoke. We must try and understand how society ‘expresses horror’ at Hathras and destroys none of its roots. How its roots continue in real and reel. Raging is easy. We must, instead, learn.

Films like Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s, speeches like Amit Shah’s, tweets like Elon Musk’s, books like Rajiv Malhotra’s, all force us into conversations men think are worth having; into answering their questions and questioning their choices. These are all fundamentally boring things to do. Why bore yourself in a world already saturated with emptiness? The margins of the past and present are littered with notations and scribbles, asterisks and question marks, statements and declarations, made by us for us. What about those?

I read When I Hit You on Diwali. Fitting, I thought, to read Meena Kandasamy’s torrential words about abusive marriages whilst celebrations were abound for a prince who forced his kidnapped wife to walk through the fires of chastity. Even in myth, we are tested. Kandasamy is able to do something with the narrative of violence that many men will not comprehend. We think that abuse is about the man, and it can be; that it is about the power(ful), and it is. But what Kandasamy does is make the story about the woman. It is her desires, her works, her dreams, her thoughts, her decisions. It is her story. It is her. What she wants, what she had, what she could have, what she has and never wants, what she never wanted. It answers her questions and thinks through her own choices. The man is there, in as much completeness as the narrator can offer. But he is not the centre. Even when he is planning and strategising every possible tactic to collapse, cloister, and clobber her. Like disallowing her from using the internet when she is alone in a new state. Like forcing her to visit fertility doctors in a bid to get pregnant so that she cannot leave. Like crying when it’s useful to do so, a strategy the narrator herself later manipulates in order to regain control and her freedom. The husband is incessant in his methods. But he is still not afforded the centre stage of the woman’s story. This isn’t to say there is a failure when we grant importance to the narratives of men. In fact, it is necessary to also look at men as objects of violence. Kandasamy affords this much to the character of the husband. His childhood stuck in abuse at the hands of his father, his adulthood stuck using those same hands upon his wife. The question remains: do men extend this care to themselves?

This book exceeds the usual discourse around domestic abuse by asking questions we are uncomfortable answering. Questions like, what happens to desire when it is shoved into your mouth? The narrator delights in ‘mental rebellions’ against her abuser by indulging in fantasies about other men. In India, this isn’t a narrative society likes to headline with when it is about a woman surviving abuse. Good women don’t desire. When they do, it’s news. ‘Woman and lover plot to murder husband’. Even in headlines, we are tested. Instead of asking ourselves why the routes to exit a marriage are so few when you’ve simply fallen out of love with a person and into love with another, we are socially executed. In every form of partnership with men, women are at risk. In domestic ones (‘live-ins’), we are chopped. In marriages, love or arranged, we are annihilated. Even when we attempt to fight back.

I recently read news of a woman in Gadchiroli who, along with another, poisoned her husband and (parents-, aunt-, and sister-) in-laws. The other woman accused of murder was engaged in a property dispute with the now deceased family. The article in The Hindu where I first read about this had an air of shock. It made sure to type ‘Maoist-hit’ but not misogyny-hit. After all, good women don’t kill but boogeyman ‘Maoist affiliated’ tribal women might. No, good women endure. And then die. Here, this wasn’t the case. The wife, an agricultural scientist, failed her own attempt at death the day before she poisoned the family. She had failed the more socially acceptable outcome of this scenario: suicide. India loves the story of a woman killing herself because then it can practise its charade of grief and advice. But you can’t grieve for a woman who fights back. It was only in subsequent research that I learnt that the wife blamed her father’s suicide 5 months prior to the poisonings on her marital family. Why? News reports aren’t interested in asking that question. They aren’t interested in pursuing the line of inquiry about what ‘harassment’ (according to the accused wife) was meted out by the husband and his family to her natal home. Or to herself for that matter. The English language press, at least, has not seemed interested in whether the woman was in a situation of abuse. Was her father a farmer in Akola, who committed suicide because of dowry loans or dwindling agricultural returns? They don’t care. The ‘accomplice’, a relative of the marital family, wasn’t investigated for her relationship (or lack thereof) to the country’s gendered and caste-based distribution of land ownership. This was an otherwise frequent story of a girl and her natal family being targeted by the marital one. But the rare conclusion of murder means the press will not consider the abuse that may have been imposed on her except when they can reduce it to ‘She was apparently often taunted by Roshan and her in-laws.’ Taunted. The tone of ‘all this just because she was taunted!’ is apparent. The continuing history of gender violence all reduced to a taunt, an eve-tease, a shame. We are forced to bear them all. The piece where I found the above quote prefaces this sentence with ‘During investigations, the police learnt that X had married Y against her parent’s wishes.’ How dare a woman not only choose who to love, but also kill the love she defied her parents for? How dare she not endure? Even in love, we are tested (as the recent ‘dowry death’ of a woman in Kerala also proves). This isn’t to say women are not capable of harm. Powerful women can unleash wreckage. But we must try and get to the roots of people’s violence.

The Gadchiroli trial also shows us the limits of India’s impulse to imprison. The two women will join thousands languishing in jail cells. What does justice mean when you were born to never live it? Decades of incarceration have not put a dent in even the meagre official statistics of reported sexual violence. According to the NCRB, one rape is reported every 16 minutes. Some say more than 50% are unreported. Others say this can go up to 99%. Rape within the boundaries of matrimony are not even counted as such. 16 minutes is just the tip of the bludgeon we face every day. Regardless, a generally held belief is that if only more men were caged, women would be safer. People say this without a hint of irony. Who should be ‘locked up’? Should the industrialists (including those disguised as spiritual leaders) who grab land from underneath tribal women’s feet be in jail? Should the production houses which routinely demand sex from actresses be in jail? Should men who pray for a film where a woman is forced to lick a shoe be in jail? Should women who follow hateful Hindu preachers and slap Muslim men on trains be in jail? If the belief behind prisons was truly realised, wouldn’t all Indians be imprisoned? Aren’t we already? We are taught to use the logic of incarceration (including the death penalty) to avoid reckoning with the roots of violence. Keep sending people to prison and never think about what makes the world around us a nightmare. It isn’t enough that for those with proximity to power, prison isn’t a closed door. It isn’t enough that the Indian police force is itself a relentless machine of violence against girls and women, capable of raping a 13 year old Dalit girl who went to the police to report her experiences of being gang-raped by 4 other men. It isn’t enough that in Delhi, the highest rate of rape conviction was against consensual sex between sexual partners whose parents disapproved of their relations (note: the State’s motivation to punish consensual sex results in faster convictions than non-consensual acts). Even in consent, we are tested. But the arm of the State is not the only form of sanctioned violence we are up against. Less than a month ago, women in Chennai bore the brunt of the ‘moral police’. Not just at the hands of individual men but also of the news media. We are tested for having fun.

I am reminded of Janaki Bai and Binodini Dasi, performers from minoritized backgrounds active in the pre-Independence era who preserved their experiences of abuse. Dasi through a poignant autobiography of her life as a sex worker and theatre artist, a translation of which Rimli Bhattacharya has published. And Bai with an unchosen route through 56 stab wounds on her face which gave her the moniker ‘Chappan Churi’ and her attacker, anonymity. Local myths are many (remember, we get tested in them), but they all converge on men. Whether that’s a small-time king insistent on seeing Bai’s face and angered at her refusal, or a ‘scorned’ lover – another reductive term. In every telling, it is the hands of a man who could not accept the mouth of a woman spelling no.

Binodini Dasi writes in 1912, 

A prostitute’s life is certainly tainted and despicable; but where does the pollution come from? […] Who are all these men? […] Those who show hatred when in the company of others, but secretly, away from the eyes of men, pretend that they are the best of lovers […]—these men are not to blame at all! Who is at fault? […] And it is these tempters of the helpless who become leaders of society and pass moral judgement on these insecure women in order to crush them at every step of their existence! Just as they have ruined these unfortunate women, if ever any one of the latter tries to build a school or undertake any such other activity so that their boy or girl might stay on the right path, then it is these heads of society who exert their utmost to drive away the children from the school. Thanks to the morality of these leaders of society, the hapless children are obliged to take to a path of evil in order to earn their livelihood and thenceforth look at the world with hate-filled eyes.

How utterly maddening that  these words still ring true a century later. The men who revel in ‘item’ songs chase us out of pubs playing the same tunes. The men who wish to rile ‘emotional’ feminists are too sensitive to receive criticism. The men who ‘love’ us abuse us. The men who abuse claim victimhood. And the trials are never over, the tests- never finished. The world burns in war. We all move towards death. Language fails to do justice to our actions. Patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, tragedy, atrocity, injustice. Every word feels too small, too puny to grasp our seemingly unending capacity to suffer and produce suffering.

What, then, are we to say to Palestinian women, abused at the hands of the ‘Israeli’ occupation and witness to what has been inflicted on themselves, their men and children every day for decades? What can we say to Kashmiri women who continue to face sexual and other forms of violence by the Indian occupation and its security forces, and are also witness to injustice against the ones they love? What are we to say when we can’t secure the joy of a 9 year old Dalit girl in this country’s capital? A girl whose body was violated by priests and then burnt (‘cremated’) by the rapists. What can we say to her? What are we to say to trans women who cannot even find homes to breath in? What are we to say to students from oppressed castes and tribes, almost 36,000 of whom were forced to kill themselves between 2019 and 2021? What can we say when everything is rubble and some of us still won’t give up comfort (unlike Sukirtharani for whom freedom is not a word to win awards with)?

What is left to say to each other? To ourselves? When this is our reality, what can we say to men who call us hysterical for not wanting to be executed on celluloid? Nothing. There is no purpose in staying with the words or films of those men, their accusations, their beliefs, or their emotions. Still, isn’t this the very mountain-moving difficulty with abuse? Leaving? But we must. We must, instead, try and stay with the words of Kandasamy, Binodini Dasi, Savitribai Phule, Ito Noe, Bibi Kamble, Ismat Chughtai, Rashid Jahan, Mahasweta Devi, Monique Wittig, Anuradha Ghandy, Leila Khaled, Toni Morrison, Sukirtharani, Bessie Head, Ursula K Le Guin, Saidiya Hartman and countless more revolutionary women. We must keep trying to find answers to the liberation of all women. We must keep fighting to obliterate fascism from the world, and fascist men from centre stage.