What
is rape? The word derives most likely from the 14th century Middle English
rapen out of the Anglo-French raper from the Latin rapere meaning “to seize, carry off by
force, plunder”. http://bit.ly/1MZpGV7 Culturally
viewed, it is an atavistic act harking back to the male chauvinistic, patriarchal,
feudalistic past. The Latin word atavus refers
to the great-great-great-grandfather or an ancestor. For the victim, rape is
existentially disruptive. For the perpetrator, rape is more often than not a
crime of opportunity. Ergo,
unpredictable and impossible to anticipate and prevent. Equally, it is a crime
that requires the existence of a special kind of mindset in the perpetrator who
may hail from any caste, class, region and religion, often from among the close
acquaintances of the victim. Mind mapping of a potential rapist would reveal, I
suspect, the existence of a patriarchal, fedudalistic terrain wherein the power
equation is forever set against women. To the rapist, women are vassals in
perpetuity. Men are the all-powerful lords and masters entitled to all kinds of
privileges as well as access to every conceivable resource including the
vassals’ bodies. The by now widely publicized views of many authority figures
as well as the rapist in the Nirbhaya case lend credence to this contention.
This
set of core “tenets” is not documented but informally passed on from generation
to generation. So strong is their stranglehold on Indians that even some of the
womenfolk willingly and readily assist their “betters” in enforcing them. This
is abundantly evident by their inclusion in the perpetrators’ line-up in dowry
and honour killings. Even village elders, gotra
(clan)-inspired khap panchayats and
similar formal or informal tribal networks willingly join such woman-hating
initiatives. One is often led to wonder if the paternalistic underpinnings of
most religions like Vedantism/Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity do not
make them the ideal breeding grounds for the rapist as well as the terrorist
mindsets.
In
the sexually vitiated Indian context, the subtext of dowry reads like this in
the warped male mind: I’m taking “the burden” off your hands. So, pay up whatever
I ask for and shut up. Of the resistance to widow remarriage: I have no use for
“used goods”. (Objectification of women is routinely implicit in all misogynous
behaviour and thinking. Even in the “civilized” Occident, only wives are
swapped, never husbands, remember?) Of “provocative” dressing and behaviour by
women: Take me. I am available.
Have
you noticed the oft-recurring visual tableaux in most dances performed by
couples? The male dancer supports his female partner with his arm wrapped
around her waist, his face looming over hers and she is arching backward as far
as she can as if to keep as much distance between the two as possible. Male
superiority/male dominance is written all over this image – just as it is in
the iconic RK Films logo − even when the choreography is orchestrated by a
woman. By so doing, is she (the female dancer): (a) accepting her inferior
status in the relationship or (b) repelling the male’s advances (a crypto-rape
scenario)?
Then,
there is the all-time classic, time-honoured “Krishna Leela” defence and/or
ratiocination, based on a myth deeply embedded in the Indian consciousness,
which nobody seems to question or object to. Krishna, the legendary lover with
reportedly 16108 wives (none of them won by relentless ragging, though),
well-known for his playful and innocent antics as a child of hiding the clothes of bathing gopis, teasing them to distraction and taking advantage of their affection
to rob them of butter, is heralded as the beacon of how a young man should woo
a young woman of his fancy, i.e., the one who currently triggers an upsurge of
testosterone in him. The “boys will be boys” justification is used with
impunity, time and again, to condone disrespectful treatment of women by “manly”
men. In the fifties and sixties, there was a spate of Hindi movies featuring
Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor and even Joy Mukerjee – the poor girl’s
Shammi Kapoor − emulating this “Krishna” school of how to woo a girl and not compromise
your machismo. This sort of depiction of the male-female equation continues to
exist in one form or another in movies and on the idiot box even now.
Much
as I would like to take an optimistic view of the situation, no way out of this
well-entrenched psycho-socio-cultural impasse seems to exist in my opinion. Legal
and/or extra-legal (e.g., lynching and, on the milder side, protests march,
candle light processions, advertising to persuade the would-be rapist to shed
his sinful ways) solutions cannot achieve the desired result. The only way to
do it is to change for the better the existing attitude and belief super structure
of India. And that, as the dashing, debonair Don would have so eloquently put
it, is not only difficult but impossible (= “mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai”).
