patriarchy, misogyny and sexism acts and reacts and rape is one of the catalysts that sustain the supremacist essence of the male hegemon community. What imparts rape as “being normal” is the idea that sexual desires are male prerogative that can’t be curbed, the crass exacerbation of display of police apathy in handling rape cases, the idea that a “bad woman” is raped (reinforcing victim blaming) and the fear of stigmatisation suffered by rape victims and their families. As the article progresses, it will raise crucial questions around rape as a political discourse of declaring supremacy over the Other. How has the political subjection engendered the feminine body to perpetuate the silence and powerlessness, since post-colonial times? How can we deconstruct and understand rape as a product of the patriarchy manufactured “docile body”, without any agency of its own? What are the various techniques of dismantling rape which concentrates on exposing the localised forms that gender power relations take at the micro-political level, in order to determine concrete possibilities for resistance and social change? Deconstructing the Rape Culture (Political Discourse of Rape) The normalisation of rape has been practised in India since the post-colonial era where the primary conquest of the Othered community was not through the land, but through its women. In fact, panoptical male connoisseurs, who stood perpetually and gazed at the bodies of women of the Othered community, as a site of victory, have normalised the regressive
Rape and violence on the bodies of the women was the language via with they communicated their political narratives.
India rape protests Photo courtesy: Getty Images
act of eroticised dysfunctional nationalism. This was witnessed during the partition of India (1947), where the vying religious communities (Hindu and Muslim) and their newly formed nations attempted to overpower each other by marking the women of the other side. Rape and violence on the bodies of the women was the language via with they communicated their political narratives. During the 1947 Partition of India, as the nation was mourning the segregation of the lands and the “once assimilated religious diversity”, as many as 100,000 women were abducted and raped. Muslim women were abducted by Hindu and Sikh men into India, and Hindu and Sikh women were abducted by Muslim men into newly partitioned Pakistan (Veena Das, Critical Events, 59). Women’s bodies were manifested into a political anatomy that communicated the language of nationalism and power. India, also synonymous as “Bharat Maata”, was portrayed as the mother, a woman that needed protection against the outside enemy. The idea of gaining control over the land through conquering the body of this “Bharat Maata” seduced the unconscious psyche of the male aggressive thanatos. The desire to possess it, see it, touch it, conquer it, claim it, wandered within the fantasy of men. Thus, women’s bodies became arenas of violent struggle. Women were humiliated, tortured, brutally raped, and murdered as part of the process that reflected the communal, national and religious conquest by the opponents. The rapes didn’t just lead to the violation of the body but it symbolised the political conquest. D.A. Low argues that while the men of the opposite side were killed, their women were abducted. Literary evidence provides accounts of women’s skin being marked with religious slogans, signing on the skin by the aggressor and imprinting of the patriotic slogans like “Pakistan Zindabad” or “Jai Hind”. The skin of a woman was not just sexually violated but it became a story via which the aggressor commented on its victory to the Other. The infiltrating of the Othered land through the coercive usage of militarisation was the objective,
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