Month: March 2016

Written by Kalpana Karunakaran.

Gender violence cannot exist on the scale it does in India unless there is endorsement and social sanction for it or at least for the conditions that breed violence against women. To understand better the idea of social sanction, I suggest we see gender violence, not only as the horrific acts of sexual assault, rape and torture that seize public attention and evoke visible protests and outrage, but as a spectrum, a continuum of everyday practices that are part of the ‘normal’, the ‘routine’ and the ‘taken-for-granted’ as we experience it. Take, for instance, the pervasive tolerance for street sexual harassment or ‘eve teasing’, its rationalization or indulgence as a form of masculine sport associated with the young, an upsurge of ‘young hot blood’ or a legitimate exercise of manhood. Or take the condoning of ‘domestic’ violence or violence within households. In a Tamil movie released in 1959, a popular song ‘adikkira kai thaan anaikkum’ (the hand that hits also embraces) has a drunkard alternatively beat and embrace his wife who weeps her way through the song even as she supports her staggering husband! The notion that women are fully human autonomous actors is a radical idea that still does not find purchase in many parts of India. But how do we account for the failure of this idea to take root and flourish in India more than sixty years into the life of the Indian republic? Perhaps some of the answers might be sought in the nature of development and capitalist modernity in India and the paradoxes and contradictions they have spawned for Indian women.