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Our e-Essays project is now LIVE! Previously-released essays are available here, and each month a new essay is available for free with any other purchase.
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The first four sets of e-Essays focused on Indian women’s movements, sexual violence, domestic space and kinship and religion and conflict. The movement against the Indian state in Kashmir, or the battle between Maoists and the state in Chhattisgarh are two examples of how governments often become suspicious of, and turn against their own citizens. Often, citizens—in these cases, women—are caught in complex webs of impunity created by state power (as in the impunity assumed by the army under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) or by non-state actors (as in the impunity violent power gives to militants and underground factions in both states). If Kashmir and Chhattisgarh are examples of states of ‘war’, the ways in which social exclusion and caste marginalization work provide shameful examples of the ongoing ‘warlike’ situation faced by Dalit women, against whom violence, especially sexual violence, has been ‘naturalized’, with state protection often standing squarely behind the (savarna) perpetrators. This week’s selection of essays—one a photo essay—sheds light on state crimes and impunity, and how women’s lives are impacted by these confrontations with state power.
1) ‘Kidnapping, Abduction, and Forced Incarceration‘ by Aloysius Irudayam S J, Jayshree P Mangubhai & Joel G Lee from Dalit Women Speak Out: Caste, Class and Gender Violence in India, 2011.
This essay sees the authors examine various methods of kidnapping/abduction and forced incarceration—on the basis of a study of 47 narratives—and then analyze the implications of these forms of violence on the fundamental rights of Dalit women.
Examining these relationships with violence, the authors conclude that non-state actors employ the method of forced incarceration to mete out punishment in the form of sexual and physical assault against Dalit women who do not conform to caste-class-gender hierarchies. The essay also notes that state actors, primarily the police, engage in their own forms of forced incarceration by the filing of false cases or the illegal detention of Dalit women. The physical isolation and restriction from dominant caste male-dominated public spaces re-emphasizes and compounds the caste-class-gender-based social exclusion and vulnerability to violence that Dalit women face. 13pp.
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Aloysius Irudayam S. J. is currently the Program Director for Advocacy Research and Human Rights Education at the Institute of Development Education, Action and Studies (IDEAS), located in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
Jayshree Mangubhai is a Senior Human Rights Adviser with the Pacific Community (SPC), a regional organisation that provides technical and scientific advice to Pacific Island governments, based in Fiji.
Joel G Lee is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA. He teaches and conducts research on caste and religion in South Asia.
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2. ‘Nobody’s Children, Owners of Nothing: Sexual Violence and Impunity in Chhattisgarh‘ by Guneet Ahuja and Parijata Bhardwaj from Fault Lines of History: The India Papers, Vol II, 2016
The conflict between the state and the left-wing insurgent groups in Chhattisgarh has created an environment of fear, and with it a number of impediments to the documentation of sexual violence in the affected areas. In this essay, lawyers Guneet Ahuja and Parijata Bhardwaj trace sexual violence and repression at the hands of the police, the Salwa Judum, and the state and central governments, all of which have enjoyed a great degree of impunity in the region. The essay also discusses the stories of Soni Sori and Meena Xalxo, two out of many cases of torture and extrajudicial murder, most of which do not emerge into the dominant narrative. Relying on sources both ‘official’ and oral which, when taken together, are telling of the extent of violence occurring in the region, Ahuja and Bhardwaj analyze what happens when authorities dismiss human lives as mere impediments to development, and state forces reject a distinction between civilians and warring groups. 46pp.
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Guneet Ahuja worked with the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group from 2014 to 2015; since then, she has been practicing law on a range of issues in Delhi. She has previously represented Adivasis in criminal litigation in the courts in Bastar.
Parijata Bhardwaj is a criminal lawyer at the Bombay High Court and a founding member of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group. In Bastar, she has worked with Adivasis towards the implementation of their fundamental rights.
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3. ‘Finding Face: Images of Women from the Kashmir Valley‘ by Sheba Chhachhi from Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir, 2002
In ‘Finding Face’, comprising of a critical essay and a series of personal testimonies interspersed with photographs, Sheba Chhachhi seeks to bring human figures back into the occupied landscape of Kashmir and give voice (/ face) to those whose lives have been obscured in the din of a prolonged war. It makes space for the individual in a history of representation that is populated with recurring tropes and warring stereotypes which, Chhachhi argues, depersonalise the Valley and its conflicts. In her work, women are no longer silent victims, they emerge as textured human beings, not only with voices with which to speak, but also with eyes that are wide open. The testimonies have been taken over a period of six years and reflect varying positions, and the interviewees are students and professionals, Muslims and Pandits, teenagers and the aged.
These photographs were part of a larger work which was initially presented as a photo-installation by Sheba Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar. The photo-essay as a whole captures the life and times of women during conflict, including during the attempted implementation of the burqa diktat in the Valley. These individuated women stand out in the frames as they look back at the viewer in more ways than one. 37 pp.
Sheba Chhachhi is is an installation artist, photographer, activist and writer whose work focuses on the history, experience and power of feminine consciousness. Through her work, she also depicts topics like migration, globalization, and urban transformation.
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FREE IN AUGUST, WITH THE PURCHASE OF ANY OTHER ESSAY:
‘The Everyday and the Exceptional: Sexual Violence and Impunity in Our Times (Introduction)‘ by Uma Chakravarti from Fault Lines of History: The India Papers II, 2016
Uma Chakravarti’s introduction to Fault Lines of History: The India Papers II uses a brief history of protest in the north-eastern states of India to illustrate the contract between the state, the army and the rule of law. Detailing the spread of AFSPA as a result and a feature of this contract, Chakravarti points to particular building blocks in the story of resistance in the area — the case of Manorama, Irom Sharmila’s hunger strike, the naked protest by imas in Manipur among others — and castigates mainstream state theorists’ neglect of AFSPA’s existence and growing application as a tool of oppressive state-building. She explains how the postcolonial state’s painting of AFSPA and militarisation, and the accompanying conflicts, as ‘states of exception’ is key to the contract, which is characterised by the tension between the rule of law and the state’s need for avowal of sovereign emergency.This chapter also provides a valuable cross-section of the volume, summarising each author’s argument while drawing connections between them and larger themes of impunity, militarisation, conflict, revolution, state (un)accountability, ‘security’ and feminist scholarship. 34pp.
Dr. Uma Chakravarti is a feminist historian who taught at Miranda House, Delhi University. She writes on Buddhism, early Indian history, the 19th century and on contemporary issues.
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A note on pricing, frequency and format:
The e-Essays project is a new initiative from Zubaan, undertaken to make our near-fifteen years of feminist research more accessible to our readers and community. Ten new essays are released each month (on the 1st, 11th, 21st), each set curated to a theme, which subscribers receive in their inbox. The essays range from just a few pages to 100-page chapters, and we have therefore created three pricing tiers: 50, 70 and 95 rupees. Responses to our test survey in March indicated that a majority of readers would be willing to pay up to Rs. 100, so we’ve kept even the longest essay under that amount. The vast majority of our readers also included PDFs in their preference of format, and we have therefore standardised all our essays in PDF files.
If you’re interested to see what’s coming next, make sure you’ve joined our mailing list, and keep your eye out for the next mailer/blog post.
Happy Reading!