This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  And then there were others who were brutalized by those they knew. From Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district, there was Archana, her face covered by giant black shades in the middle of the day to hide the ridged and scored skin corroded by acid. She had been stalked for five years by a man obsessed with her, the acid was the man’s answer to her lack of romantic interest in him. In a country where it is not uncommon for Hindi cinema to indulgently show a persistent suitor who never takes no for an answer, courting and cajoling, even breaking into song whilst pulling at the heroine’s dupatta, the idea that a woman had the right to set her own boundaries of space and privacy was still an alien one. Archana’s stalker started harassing her when she was still a student at school and finally insisted that she marry him. When she declined he entered her house and flung acid on her face and simply walked away. ‘I felt as if the sky had opened up and collapsed on me; my life changed in an instant,’ Archana said, showing me a photograph of herself before the attack. Flawless skin, deep black eyes set apart by a distinctive, aquiline nose, a bright smile that travelled right up to the corner of her eyes—it was the look of a confident young woman who was dreaming of a life bigger and better than anything the village of Dulhara had to offer her. Today, despite twenty-three surgeries—operations for which the family had sold the little land they owned and every piece of jewellery they possessed—craters and cracks indent the surface of her face. ‘The acid slashed the skin off my face; my appearance was so frightening that adults would look at me strangely and little children were too scared to talk to me,’ Archana said, her voice more matter of fact than anguished. Her father was now undergoing psychiatric treatment and her mother had to take pills just to sleep at night. Sitting by her side, fighting back tears, her mother told me she had had big dreams for Archana, but the man who had done this to her daughter had destroyed them all. ‘At least I still have the confidence to speak to you and the world at large,’ Archana said, consoling her mother. ‘I keep thinking how many other women like me must be suffering in silence. Who do they unburden their hearts to? Let me tell you, for all your kind words and sympathy, no one else can ever feel my pain or what my parents have gone through.’

  IV

  I was not even ten when I was first sexually abused. The perpetrator was a distant older relative who had come to stay with us for a short period of time. Like many Punjabi households, ours was an open house, always welcoming to cousins and their friends, and their friends in turn. Today, decades later, I cannot even recall the precise connection of this man to my family. But, to a child’s eye, he was avuncular and affectionate and, in any case, I just assumed I was safe in my own home.

  Little did I imagine that this much-older, family figure—someone who would take the kids for piggy-back rides and twirl us around in the air—could be such a monster. Worse still, as a child unable to process the magnitude of what had happened—I was the one who felt grotesque and dirty. The concept of teaching your child to distinguish between ‘good touch’ and ‘bad touch’ had not yet become the enlightened norm. But after the first few times I had innocently followed him to ‘play’ with him in his room, I was overcome by panic and disgust.

  Ridden with guilt, unable to shake off the feeling of being dirty and trapped in a sink of fear, I finally told my mother that something terrible had happened. My assaulter was immediately thrown out of the house and I buried the awfulness of the memory in a deep, dark place that I hoped I would never have to revisit. As I grew older, what stayed with me, strangely enough, was the rancid smell of hair-oil; even years later, anything that smelt faintly similar made me nauseous. In my growing years, I blocked out the man’s face, his name, in fact the very incident was banished to the recesses of my consciousness; but from that moment onwards, sexual abuse had an odour.

  It was the loneliest and most frightened I had felt as a child and the fear lurked in the shadows, following me into adulthood. I discovered that I was often wary, even scared, of sexual relations—a familiar consequence for those who had experienced abuse as children.

  I didn’t know it then but my experience, horrible as it was, was hardly uncommon. In 2007, the first ever government survey of child sexual abuse uncovered that more than half the children spoken to (53 per cent) said they had experienced some form of sexual abuse. Twenty per cent of those interviewed said they had been subjected to severe abuse, which the report defined as ‘sexual assault, making the child fondle private parts, making the child exhibit private body parts and being photographed in the nude’. Yet, the silence of young victims and the misplaced shame they felt shielded the perpetrators. These were men deeply embedded in the family structure, it made it that much more difficult to call them out. The report found that 31 per cent of the sexual assaults were by an uncle or neighbour. So it wasn’t surprising that over 70 per cent of children had never spoken to anyone of what was done to them.

  The toughest discovery for me was to find that feminism offered no shield against the vulnerability, confusion, guilt and rage you felt when you were abused.

  As a young adult who experienced violence in a personal relationship for the very first time as a postgraduate student at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, my response was less confused but no easier to act on. By now I was a self-aware young woman with strong opinions. I thought I was difficult to intimidate. I believed I would know exactly what to do if a man I was dating ever hit me. Of course I would take him to the cops, I would say with confidence when we sat around discussing how unfriendly the legal system was towards women. I thought I was never going to stand for anything like domestic abuse. It went against every book I had read, every principle I held as sacred and every bit of my self-image. Until it happened.

  I was briefly in a relationship with a fellow student at the university’s mass communication centre. It was a very different environment from the people-like-us safety of St Stephen’s. Budding filmmakers exemplified every depressing cliché you could think of. Everyone smoked; you even lit up in class because the zany graphic design teacher did; everyone was filled with angst and cynicism and everyone thought ‘intense’ and ‘dysfunctional’ were interchangeable adjectives.

  I was a bit of a misfit. I did not smoke, I hadn’t yet had my first drink and I was considered puritanical and uptight in an environment where it was assumed that creative people were sexually promiscuous. I don’t quite remember how I ended up straying into an unlikely involvement with a fellow student who was studying to be a cinematographer. Quite soon I knew that the relationship was wrong for me. Warning bells began sounding the day the man suddenly grabbed a razor blade and opened up his wrists when we had an argument and I told him I no longer wanted to be with him. In absolute horror I watched him wrap his scratched wrists in strips of white Band-Aid and calmly smoke a cigarette, his eyes fixed on me in a cold, hard stare. It could have been a bad movie, except this was my life, it was happening to me. I knew I was being manipulated and blackmailed, yet I was terrified. I didn’t end the relationship that day.

  The next time we met I was categorical that I was not going to allow myself to be emotionally and mentally bullied. When I told him that it was over between us he sprang up from the floor where he had been lounging, pinned me to the ground and lay on top of me, trying to sexually force himself on me. I slapped him. He hit me hard, grabbed me by my arm, shoved me around, slapped me and pushed me against the wall. My face was burning up with pain and anger. I pushed him away, walked out and took a rickshaw back home. My right cheek was now a purplish blue mass. Initially, I told my family that I had walked into a door.

  But I had resolved that I was never going to be a woman who would hide abuse because of a misplaced sense of embarrassment. I was determined to complain officially to the campus authorities and contemplated going to the police. But this was still the early nineties. There were no sexual harassment guidelines, there was no rape law, there was no environment of support that is available to women in these situations today. Sti
ll, I took the faculty into confidence. Some of my teachers were progressive feminists themselves. They were empathetic but also practical. They explained that I still had two years of my programme left before I would get my degree. The university was unlikely to act on a ‘he said, she said’ complaint.

  To reiterate, at the time, there were no mandated sexual harassment committees in existence. The Vishaka Guidelines would only be passed in 1997 and the Domestic Violence Act even later, in 2005. To review the options I had, I went to meet lawyers who worked in a women’s collective. Could I take this to court, I asked? They told me, as kindly as they could, that I would spend the next two decades in court and the fact that the violence had taken place within a relationship would only be held against me.

  I spoke to other students and discovered that other women too had been hit and abused by the same man who had done this to me. But they weren’t willing to put their names down on any kind of official petition asking for his expulsion. For all the fight I thought I had in me, I was effectively helpless. The most I managed was to get myself placed in a separate working group where I would never have to interact with him again. As I went about my work on campus as bravely as I could, I could hear the sniggers and the gossip behind my back. It was I who was considered the troublemaker, not the actual perpetrator.

  In 1994 when I applied for my first job at New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) I had only one request. If ‘that man’ from Jamia was going to be hired as a cameraman (remember, private television had not yet taken off in India and the pool of trained people available was very small), I could not accept the job. They agreed. And I never saw him again. It was perhaps the most isolating experience of my adult life.

  Much later in life, I would discover that I was not alone; almost every young woman I knew had experienced something essentially similar—not just out on the streets, but within the so-called safe zone. This was not startling for a country in which government data itself shows that even today, 90 per cent of Indian women who have been sexually abused know their assaulter. What broke us internally and what we could not fight publicly was the abuse we experienced within the circle of trust. We could slap the molester on the local train but were almost never able to say out loud that among our uncles, cousins and family friends were sexual predators who had manipulated us into feeling a shame that should have been theirs. We buried it deep within us, unable, even years later, to excavate the pain, the anger and the confusion.

  In Bangalore, Suja Jones uncovered a truth that was probably worse than being violated yourself—that the man she was married to was sexually abusing her children. She believes it all started when she was expecting their third child. Her infant daughter would use broken baby words to indicate that all was not well. The first time her baby girl said ‘Papa hurt me down there,’ Suja’s husband explained it away by saying he’d bathed her with soap which may have caused discomfort. ‘I am a woman who comes from an educated, privileged background. But I loved my husband, I was dependent on him. At first, I thought I am sitting at home with two children, maybe I am the one going crazy,’ she said explaining how she kept living in denial. ‘I didn’t want the pretty picture of my family to collapse. It tears me up today that my daughter was trying to tell me something in her faltering baby language and I chose not to understand it.’ It was another year before her daughter was able to construct a full sentence and tell her mother why it suddenly hurt to urinate. The internal struggle was as fierce as external pressure; Suja didn’t tell her parents until the news of her filing a criminal case against her husband was out in the papers. ‘I kept rationalizing things to myself, denying even what the doctors were telling me in their initial evaluation. When the hospital test confirmed presence of sperm, it was a slap on my face. After that there was no looking back possible,’ she said, consumed by the guilt of her initial inaction.

  In 2013, just a few months after the Delhi gang rape, the same sort of anger that had galvanized public opinion after 16 December erupted again—this time, after the sexual assault of a five-year-old. ‘Gudiya’, as she was christened by the media, was found tied up in a basement where she had been locked up for over forty hours. She had suffered chronic internal injuries; a bottle of hair oil and candles had been forced into her private parts. Her rapists, who lived in the same building, had lured her into the basement with the promise of potato chips. Her father, a daily-wage labourer, had migrated to the capital from Sitamarhi in Bihar, one of the poorest districts in India, so underdeveloped that according to the 2001 census, 92 per cent of its villagers lived without any medical facilities. Now, as he stood in the ICU of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, watching his infant daughter going through her fifth reconstructive surgery, he recounted how he had been offered Rs 2,000 to withdraw his criminal complaint. It was heartbreaking to observe the little girl, dressed in a purple frock, frail and so very tiny, enveloped by the sheets of the hospital bed she lay on. Her internal organs had been damaged and she was awaiting a colostomy; a bag had to be created to divert her stool while her doctors tried to repair the damaged organs. Four surgeries later the hospital discharged her but her family discovered that they would need to keep changing neighbourhoods. As murmurs began to spread about what had happened to their daughter, people began to blame them for not ‘controlling’ Gudiya. They had shifted four homes already; the victim—even when she was a child—had been made the accused.

  V

  Unlike India, much of the western world took its time to grant women the right to vote or run for office. Women were not allowed to vote in ancient Greece and Rome and it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that women’s suffrage even became a rallying point. It would take until after World War I for the electoral empowerment of women to gather momentum. The suffragette movement that swept through countries like Great Britain and the United States seemed odd to us here in India as women had had voting rights from the time independent India held its first election in 1952. A few years later, in 1955, the Hindu Marriage Act gave women the right to own and inherit property and the right to divorce. As a new nation, India was far more forward-thinking than many much older democracies.

  All the more reason then, for the patriarchal nature of Indian society to be such a contradiction in terms. The country’s culture of patriarchy has its origins, not in its Constitution, but in age-old religious scriptures, tenets and traditions. What is one to make of a country that worships women but blesses new mothers with the exhortation to give birth to a ‘hundred sons’? How does one reconcile that places of worship, the famous Sabarimala Temple among them, often forbid menstruating women from entering their compounds, even as ‘infertile’ women are scorned and rejected by society? When I put this question to Rahul Easwar, a trustee of the Sabarimala temple board, he called me a ‘fundamentalist feminist’.

  I met with women of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan who have been fighting for years to abolish the ‘triple talaq’ diktat which allows a Muslim man to divorce his wife simply by uttering the word talaq thrice. Even though the seventh-century law has been reformed or abolished across much of the Muslim world, it continues to thrive in India. And the Muslim Personal Law Board has openly scorned women of the community who are fighting for reform.

  There has been a highly-charged and politicized debate around a uniform civil code for India, a directive principle in the Constitution. Because of the politics, consensus has been elusive and the orthodoxy of personal laws—across religions—continues to militate against gender equality.

  The confusion and contradictions of India’s feminist movement can be traced back to the paradoxes of the country’s ancient cultural and religious traditions. In her critique of Indian feminism, Why Kali Won’t Rage, Rita Banerji has explored why women’s movements in the West have been much angrier than in India. Banerji locates what she calls the relative ‘passivity in the face of extreme tyranny’ to the cultural constructs built by ancient religious texts like the Manusmriti that offers
, among other things, this set of instructions:

  A girl, a young woman, or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her sons.

  On the other hand, Banerji points out, the Shakta cults that arose in the first millennium ad, believed in worshipping women:

  The Shakta goddesses were immodest, and assertive in their needs and demands, in all arenas, including sex. As in the myths of Radha and Sati, the goddess broke social conventions of marriage, caste and clan in her choice of sexual partners. And when confronted with men who wanted to sexually exploit her, the goddess would, as Durga or Kali, respond to the affront with fearsome rage and spectacular battle skills—destroying the men in a bloody battle and then wearing their decapitated heads in a victory garland around her neck.