Confronting the rules of rape

EVERY WOMAN HAS A NAME. Some women gather names because of how they inscribe themselves into our memories, into history. The 23-year-old woman studying to be a physiotherapist who was raped by a gang of six men on a moving bus in Delhi on 16 December, and died 13 days later in a Singapore hospital from the gruesome injuries they inflicted on her, acquired many names in the course of her brief life. Perhaps the many names we gave her tell us more about our desire to participate in the unfolding of her fate than they do about her actual identity.

We may or may not now know her name, but to insist on remembering her brief but highly public anonymity enables us to see refracted in her the image of every woman who has been raped and assaulted in our time. It becomes possible for us to see, at the scene of this crime, a shadow of the AFSPA-darkened night in Kashmir or Manipur, a reminder of the rapes in Haryana and Chhattisgarh, in Naroda Patia, in Guwahati, or in Khairlanji. It becomes possible to see that bus as an Indian Army truck, or as a police lock-up, as a house targeted for burning in a Dalit or Muslim neighbourhood, or as any common marital bed in India. Her anonymity makes it possible for us to consider what it means to be an unknown citizen in the darkness, regardless of whether she is called Neelofar or Asiya Jan, Bilqis Patel, Mathura Bai, Bhanwari Devi, Meena Xalxo, Lakshmi Orang, Soni Sori, Surekha Bhotmange, Thangjam Manorama, or by any common name, like Jenny, Jamila, Jugni or Jyoti.

A woman who goes out into the night—to claim the night, to revel in its promise, thrill and comfort—has always been called names. Not all of these names are pejorative. In the Sanskrit canon, she is sometimes the Abhisarika, the wanderer, who goes to meet her lover by the riverbank, or in a forest, or in a garden. Inevitably, she is seen as a source of light. Her desire is a flame that lights up everything around her. In the folk songs of the Punjab, she can be a firefly, a restless, wandering  jugni. And women, together, out on the streets, out to claim each hour, each watch of the night, can light up an entire forest of a city with their flickering, blazing fire.

More often than not, the traditions that bind women by day also curse those who choose to be out and about at night. The holy eminence who implies that a young woman who boards a bus at night with a man who is neither her brother nor her husband is asking to be raped (“taali ek haath se nahin bajti”—one does not clap with one hand) speaks at a lower register than the rapid nasal treble of a misogynist rapper. But essentially Honey Singh and Asaram Bapu sing the same song: women who shape their own desires—who act with agency and defy the codes of patriarchy—can only be punished.

Sometimes that punishment, as Honey Singh, the self-proclaimed “International Villager”, puts it so succinctly in his song “Choot Vol. 1”, is to exorcise the woman’s wayward and wanton desire by assaulting her vagina, by ripping it apart, by pissing into it. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, in its sixth chapter, offers today’s rapists an ancient scriptural seal of approval, declaring that the woman who denies sex to a man who owns her can be beaten into submission. (“Should she refuse to consent, he should bribe her; if she still refuses, he should beat her with a stick or with his fists and overpower her.”) Those who seek may find echoes of this misogyny in the Ahadith, the Bible and the Talmud; the divines of almost every religion have found it possible, whenever expedient or necessary, to treat women’s bodies as men’s property.

This endorsement of what a man in spate can do with a body he regards as chattel is the building block of all oppression: that body, usually female, is the template on which every other kind of disempowered being is modeled. The language of abjection that describes what a woman is to a man in patriarchy extends to the child, the aged, the queer, the captive, the slave, the subaltern, and the injured; that is why patriarchy is the foundation on which the citadels of race, caste and class are built. The young women and men protesting on the streets of Delhi know this when they say “Nari Mukti, Sabki Mukti” (the liberation of women is the emancipation of all). They know, instinctively, that the protocols of patriarchy are hard-coded into the rules of the alienation of the labouring body, as they are in the distancing devices of race and the indices of purity and pollution that anchor the sacred horror and hierarchy of caste. The woman in labour is the first worker. The menstruating woman is the first outcaste, the first untouchable.

Central to this code of control is power over sexual expression and freedom: control over a woman’s sex organs is viewed as vital to controlling her reproductive prowess. Patriarchy is concerned with sex not because it is lustful, but because it is interested in harvesting the results of procreation, especially when it yields masculine progeny. The continuity of male power is preserved through an intergenerational transmission of its claims—and this chain of command across time can exist only when fathers know their sons, and when sons know their fathers. In patriarchy, the controlled female body is only the means (and the only means) by which fathers beget (and know) sons, and that is why control over the female body and over female sexuality is key to the maintenance of power in all its forms.

Mothers, siblings and progeny are ordinarily exempt from the rules of rape because the incest taboo ensures that men believe that they ought not to beget sons by their mothers, daughters or sisters. That is why mothers are worshipped and sisters and daughters are traded in patriarchal cultures; all other women are fair game. The appeal that men should treat unrelated women as if they were “mothers or sisters” (and so not rape or molest them) is deeply humiliating towards all women. It assumes that there are always some notional “other” women, neither mother nor sister, whose rape is permitted. The abrasive rhythm of “mother-fucker” and “sister-fucker”— the contrapuntal currency of almost every Indo-European language, and the unmistakable aural signature of the common speech of North Indian men—is also the greatest insult a man can hurl at another man. It means that the insulted man is so unmanly and idle that the only women he can find to violate are the ones who are both familial and forbidden to him by the rules of rape.

Rape is seen as a crime of dishonour in most traditions because what is stolen, robbed or vandalised is not a woman’s dignity or bodily integrity, but the honour of the man who purportedly owns her sex. Indian law still cannot get its head around the concept of marital rape. How can a husband rape his wife? How can he rob himself of his own property? A woman who asserts her sexuality, or is seen to be asserting her sexuality, independently, outside of marriage, is essentially seen as fair game in a patriarchal culture, because, being no man’s property (and refusing to be property), she can be made to become any man’s property.

Until recently, the canon of Bollywood faithfully followed the rules of rape. The core of a film’s narrative lay in a tightly scripted romance that was fated to end in marriage: since only a married woman can be a sexed woman, by virtue of being a man’s sexual property, only a married woman can have sex. For decades, this tautology framed the entire sexual politics of Bollywood, more or less completely (with very few exceptions). Since marriage was the conclusion and not the substance of a film’s narrative, representation of the sexual act between the male and female protagonists was out of the question. It had to occur happily ever after the story ended. This did not mean an absence of erotic titillation. In fact, the less chance there was of actual sex, the more there could be of extended titillation—which is basically what the classic Bollywood song and dance number is all about. Alternatively, when sex had to be shown, it could only be as rape. Since no virtuous woman would have sex outside of (or before) marriage, if the heroine, or any positive female character in a film, had to be seen having sex, it could only be shown as occurring against her volition. That is why the cinema of the 1970s and 1980s is so dependent on the token rape scene. A film had to have sex, because that is what people wanted to see, but it could only have sex as rape, because the heroine, being as yet unmarried, could not have any other kind of sex.

The token rape scene soon grew into an entire sub-genre of ’80s exploitation film: the rape-and-revenge movie (with its own sub-sub genre of the zombie-rape-horror movie specialised in by the Ramsay Brothers). This kind of film—prime examples include Insaaf Ka Taraazu, Zakhmi Aurat, and Red Rose—had a brief period of enormous success, during which filmmakers managed to titillate and moralise at the same time. The moment women (especially unmarried characters) in Bollywood cinema began having sex of their own free will, or asserting their sexuality in a positive, joyful, mature manner, the rape scenes virtually evaporated.

But the hysterical television news spectacles that call for hanging and castration as a solution to rape are the true inheritors of the legacy of the Bollywood rape-exploitation-revenge genre. One network even gave the Delhi rape victim a name borrowed from the title of a rape-revenge courtroom melodrama: “Damini”, a flash of lightning. The sanctimonious demagoguery that dominated the airwaves for weeks on end demonstrated nothing so much as a generalised bloodlust masquerading as patronising, protective concern. This was the gallery to which politicians across the entire spectrum of Indian parties played with egregious remarks such as “dented and painted” and “Indian and Bharatiya”, and with their calls for confining and veiling women. It would be a mistake to gloss these outrageous statements as simply the spontaneous, malodorous and ill-timed discharge of patriarchal hot air. They were moves calculated to ride a misogynist backlash against the upsurge of protests by young women and men, in Delhi and elsewhere, which had improvised a new language of feminist and emancipatory assertion on the street.

The protests, including one on New Year’s Eve, were called “Take Back the Night”, echoing earlier feminist mobilisations across the world. These virtually leaderless protests consisted primarily of a new generation of young women who are no longer prepared to compromise on their autonomy and are politicised in a completely new way by the idiocy and brutality of the state. As they walked the streets of the city, often holding candles and torches at night, in tens, hundreds, occasionally thousands, they formed meandering processions of light, a legion of jugnis, fireflies perforating the darkness with points of flickering light.

While Honey Singh spits his misogyny, there are other traditions in Punjabi popular culture that dance to a different beat. Foremost amongst these are the Jugni songs, whose origins remain shrouded in delicious uncertainty. It could be that the word “Jugni” just connotes the feminine for Jugnu, the firefly. Some believe Jugni refers to Jogins, wandering women mystics and sufis who sang and danced their way through the countryside of late medieval Punjab, heralding an eccentric liberation of spirits, bodies and desires for women as well as men. To some, the Jugni is a set of beads in a rosary, that stand in for the mysterious and inscrutable alphabets that dot the scriptures, cryptic reminders and mementoes of ineffable hopes and longings. According to other accounts, two gallant young balladeers, Manda and Bishna, a Muslim and a Sikh, began singing “jugni” when a torch meant to signify the jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign passed belatedly through the Punjab in 1906. The poets followed the jubilee torch, raising a sardonic, questioning voice against the oppression of colonial rule.

Whatever its origins, in songs Jugni is also the name of a wandering, restless woman, who lives by her own rules, asks awkward questions, makes strong subversive demands, and laughs, dances, cries and takes lovers when and where she wants. In these songs, Jugni is a woman in command of her self and her body; she celebrates her desires, learns new tongues and words and makes her way through the world, through the night.

I have heard many jugnis, sung in Punjabi, Seariki, Sindhi and Urdu, in India, Pakistan, Britain and Canada, by voices as diverse as Alam Lohar, Asa Singh Mastana, Kuldeep Manek, Rabbi Shergill, Gurdaas Mann, Sukhvinder Singh, Arif Lohar and Meesha Safi, Sher Miandad Khan and Naghmana Jafri, Jasmit and Rukhan Wangu, and Asha Bhosle.

In Bollywood songs, Jugni finds herself dancing as a young Farida Jalal to Asha Bhosle, virtually offering a sung variant of the feminist slogan “yes means yes and no means no”, in a 1971 film called Paras. In recent years, Jugni sneaks into the soundtracks of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (where she is the solace of a melancholic thief), Cocktail (where the Jugni song is far superior to Honey Singh’s monotonous “Angreji Beat”) and Sahib Biwi aur Gangster (where she shoots straight and talks dirty).

She is darkly, broodingly political in Rabbi Shergill’s voice, talking about state terror in Kashmir and riots in Delhi in 1984. She is hilariously modern when sung by Asa Singh Mastana, playing tennis and learning English. She is downright raunchy, and yet tells intrusive men where to get off, when she escapes with Jasmit in a music video called “Jugni Furr” (Jugni Flies).

Jugni is the woman who Honey Singh can’t yo-yo. Jugni is the woman who will slap Asaram Bapu and laugh at Mohan Bhagwat. Jugni is the woman who will demand the resignation of the police commissioner and tweet from her detention inside a police station. Jugni is the woman who can take tear gas and climb a lamp post and jump a barricade. Jugni is the woman who can dent Abhijit Mukherjee and paint the town red. Jugni doesn’t need Mamata or Sushma or Sonia or Sheila to weep for her and she doesn’t weep for them. Jugni is angry and Jugni is alive.

The past few weeks I have seen hundreds of young women in Delhi, Abhisarikas, wandering in the darkness, walking in the daytime, speaking, asking questions, singing, dancing, grieving, thinking. They are walking with their friends and comrades, with their lovers and sisters, reclaiming the city, inch by inch, for that nameless woman in whose memory they keep vigil and who is now the source of their radiance. Each one of them is a Jugni, like she was, and like a conflagration of fireflies they are taking back the night.

Correction: A sentence in the original article listing the "rape-and-revenge" films of the 1980s erroneously included the film Khoon Bhari Maang. The sentence has been corrected online.