Trigger Warning: Caste, Rape.
Four men thought no one would care if they brutalised the body and ended the life of a 19-years-old girl. They treated her like a thing, beat her to near death.
Local police thought this heinous crime was so run-of-the-mill that it took 10 days to arrest the four culprits.
The government thought for twenty days before it moved the broken teenager to a hospital in New Delhi for specialised care.
It sounds surreal to some. Sadly, this thoughtless treatment is meted out to Dalit women daily. Within minutes of her death, a senior journalist thought and wrote that calling the crime by its real name was reducing the heinousness of the crime.
It is a crime against all women, said Pallavi Ghosh. But, are all women treated the same? Do we all enjoy Ghosh’s privilege?
Human Rights Watch reports are contrary to Ghosh’s notion that all women lead the same lives. Eight Dalit women are raped in India everyday. A HRW Report found Dalit women are subjected to all manner of heinous abuse including “making women eat human defecation, parading them naked, gang rapes, these are women-specific crimes…
Gang rapes are mostly of Dalit women.”
For a moment, think about the subsequent delay in registering a complaint, the delay bringing the girl to a hospital equipped to take care of her injuries tell us one thing.
The Hathras rape IS a caste-based sexual violence committed by upper-caste men in order to humiliate an entire community. The manner in which the UP and Central government failed to take care of this young life is also rooted in the caste-system.
It is never right to compare one rape to another, but it was only eight years ago that these same politicians cried out for Justice for Nirbhaya. There was no questioning whether the incident was a murder or a rape or even if it fell within the definition of rape. At that time, Indian law only recognised penetration with a penis as rape. Within a day, women flocked to India Gate; within months, laws changed to include penetration with an object — keeping in mind the manner in which four poor migrant workers raped Nirbhaya.
After the Hathras victim died and Dalit feminists stood up to call the crime by what it is, Sarvara people wrote:
The prejudice is writ large for all to see, and yet we waste time even now pontificating about what to call this crime.
The perpetrators believed that they would get away with the crime because of the privilege afforded to them by their caste and gender.
While journalists and janta debated the nature of the crime, the UP government and police were hard at work. Did they carry the girl’s body back to her village for proper last rites? Did they allow her grieving family the most basic of humaneness: seeing their daughter one last time, cremating her according to their rites rituals?
They did not.
Instead, in the dead of night, police heaped the young woman’s body on just-collected wood, poured petrol, and lit her up like garbage. The family, having lost their daughter, lost their chance to say their goodbyes — her burning pyre cordoned, 600 feet away from them, off by the police.
The next day, the UP officials began to spin the story: the girl was not raped; she died of spinal injuries. The village was cut off for reporters, for members of Parliament who wanted to comfort the family.
The state pressurising the family to retract their statement to the media serves as a savage reiteration of their helplessness.
Imagine being unable to grieve on own your terms.
Imagine having something as brutal happen to you, and then being coerced into accepting that you were never brutalised.
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Privilege, it would seem, comes at the cost of one’s imagination.
Imagination buried under centuries of accumulated privilege can limit one’s ability to empathise with the life experiences of people traumatised by the very structures that one stands and grows on. It is a weakness best hidden. Perhaps it is easier to hold on to one’s false sense of superiority by gaslighting Dalits into accepting an ignorant and narrow version of reality; and pretend caste is a relic from the bygone era that doesn’t infect every aspect of our lives as Indians. To deny this is not just caste-blind, but a sign of being blinded by caste.
The Hathras case is the inevitable outcome of a socio-political ecosystem structured on the basis of brahminical patriarchy — a term that encapsulates the dominant ideology which organises Indian society on the basis of caste and gender.
Caste is a notion, it is a state of mind. The destruction of Caste does not, therefore mean the destruction of a physical barrier. It means a notional change
Dr B. R Ambedkar.
Brahminical patriarchy confers upon Savarna men, varying degrees of impunity depending upon their location in the graded hierarchy of the varna order; and on savarna women, varying degrees of purity and protection depending on the status of the men they are related to.
This categorisation is based on one’s birth and also one’s relative conformity to the archetype of an ideal Brahmin woman — fair-skinned, innocent, ‘traditional’ (which basically means wearing markers of submission such as sindoor, toe rings etc), self-sacrificing, demure, devoted to and “protected” by her male savarna counterparts; think a Sati-Savitri.
This idea of femininity is contrasted with the archetype of the othered ‘avarna’ (Dalit/ Adivasi) woman— independent (often working class), assertive, dark, seductive, accentuated breasts, lustful, wild, easy, impure; think of most of the roles played by Silk Smita.
The “pure” woman is considered the property of her father, brother or husband. The power that the caste system confers upon the men they are related to defines them. These men who “own” them so to speak, have the socio-political capacity to deter unknown, and unrelated, especially lower caste men from “polluting” their women.
(Note: Such “protection” provided on the grounds of status and honour of the Savarna men as opposed to the consent, agency and autonomy of the women, does not minimise the vulnerability of Savarna women to being subjected to sexual assault within their social networks or when they venture into spaces where their caste is unidentifiable; or their “protectors” turning into their enemies if they choose to exercise agency especially when such agency threatens the established norms of Brahminical Patriarchy.)
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Dalit women, onto whom the avarna woman’s archetype is collectively projected, are considered “open” to sexual assault, as the men they are related to, aren’t conferred with the comparable capacity to “protect” them like UC men would of their women.
It is pertinent to highlight some examples that depict the social location of Dalit women under Brahminical Patriarchy—breast tax was imposed upon lower caste women of the erstwhile Brahmin King ruled Travancore state if they wanted cover themselves; the levy was measured on the basis of the size of the breasts. The Devadasi Tradition that sexually exploited lower caste women in the name of serving God is another shameful example. Though these practices are now abolished, the worldview that had once normalised them, persist.
Dalit women’s bodies have been sexualised vis-à-vis that of the ideal Brahmin/Savarna women’s, to create our very own version of the Madonna-Whore complex. It is so deeply embedded in our collective consciousness and culture that it strongly defines the average Indian man’s gaze and attitude towards women regardless of the actual caste identity or their knowledge of the same.
Women who do not strictly conform to the “pure” Brahmin woman archetype are viewed as easy and their bodies as sites over which one can unleash their repressed depravity.
Therefore, in many Savarna families, women are conditioned to embody the archetype of the “pure” woman for respectability and are warned against behaviours considered avarna— speaking up, reminding the people around them that they too are human, in any form or manner.
While these psycho-social dynamics play out more subtly in urban contexts where it is relatively difficult to trace people’s caste identities; in rural areas where that information is widely available, these dynamics play out more explicitly, as everyone is primarily identified through their caste.
Even the state can do little to change these entrenched social orders. This phenomenon is quite accurately depicted in the movie Article 15, which, despite its flaws, provides a basic understanding of the caste-gender nexus.
When the victims of rape are additionally disadvantaged by caste, assistance, relief, and justice become more inaccessible. Notions of purity and pollution intrinsic to Indian socio-religious thought additionally denies Dalit women any moral worth that is capable of being violated.
When an entire society is structured to treat your body as something disposable, it’s hard to assert the value of your consent or agency. Some survivors internalise this message too; it is exhausting to constantly fight for a self-image that is at odds with how the society chooses to define you.
These deep-rooted beliefs shape an attitude of general neglect and dismissal of Dalit women, making it harder for their trauma to be acknowledged, (unless it is extreme and shocking); let alone fight for justice.
What then can the state machinery— built and manned by the very people, who benefit from such a social order, do? Perhaps, deny that the victim was gang-raped at all, right after a rushed and hushed pre-dawn destruction of the inconvenient evidence of India’s unapologetic casteism. Oh, wait, they did that.
India prefers to eradicate the memory of her disposable ‘daughters’ than to reflect on her complicity in harbouring toxic social orders and dismantle them.
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This essay is authored by Mrudula, a lawyer and writer. She tweets from @lawandemotions
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