Shame and honour in the family

Today, obviously, the important propositions to be reiterated are not spiritual but political. The important, politically exploitable, proposition in J&K is Article 370. No party in the state can ignore the political mileage to be derived by conspicuously championing it. The people seem to want the Article. The special status conferred by it has become, to all appearances, a part of Kashmiri identity. Political need seems to be in tandem with public demand. For a party to harness successfully this huge energy-compound of political need and public readiness is obviously to win for itself a commanding position in state politics. The returns are high. The bids there have to be bold, life-size. The play and script have to be emotive and what can be more emotive than the introduction of woman in a situation in which egos are testing destiny?

An apt illustration here is the custom of honour killings, still very much alive among us. The male members of a family get together to avenge the honour of a sister or daughter or some other female member of the family. In reality, it is the honour of the family which is seen to have been affected. The girl’s honour is tarnished. But the family honour is violated, a much more serious form of damage. Such honour is considered restored only when the girl, assuming that she has escaped the carnage, is married. This is no easy job in the best of circumstances. It is an even less easy job for a girl “with a past”. For, she earns this image despite the male’s heroic intervention. She loses even the small bargaining power she had as a “normal” girl of no record. She can now be married off to a man twice her age. None of this is the stuff of tragedy. Tragedy was put down once and for all when it threatened to destroy family honour.

In keeping with this time-tested strategy of hijacking a woman-centred theme for purposes of power, the J&K government has picked up a theme from marriage customs. It is that of kanyadaan, or making over the girl into the keeping of her husband and his family. The girl gifted away is thus a living embodiment of the term used for her from birth — paraaya dhan, alien property. The central motif of this tableau is contained in the theme of the alien and of alienisation. The state government, as we know, is obsessed with this theme. So, the prevailing folk-cultural expressions of the theme are picked up. And these are then transfused into the political agenda. Woman, Marriage and Alienisation become homogeneous. Each is separated from its larger context, distorted and inserted into the obtaining political agenda. What about the support for the Bill from Kashmiri women, it may be asked. But you can find women singing praises of purdah, extolling the virtues of sati.

Today, gender awareness are very much parts of the educated person’s field of concern. And there is enough knowledge available of the steady and easy plagiarising of woman-centred scripts that has gone on down the ages. It is entirely possible today to deconstruct the thinking behind the Bill, and not be fooled by the rhetoric. The J&K government has shown amazing naivete in assuming that the bogey of the Outsider, which it has established, along with its popular appeal, will neutralise the woman-unfriendly edge to the Bill. This did almost happen, though. Professional politicians like a Sonia Gandhi or a Mehbooba Mufti are evidently not the stuff of which grassroot feminist activists are made. If they had been, they would have smelt in the psychological make-up of the Bill the reek of the tradition-sanctioned dispossessing of daughters. But feminist sentiments have surfaced. We do not mean by feminist sentiments the protests of the Centre. We know what such protests are worth given its stance on issues like the bill for women’s reservations. We mean honest-to-goodness feminist sentiments that have seeped into public awareness.

The J&K government argues that since this Bill has nothing against women from other states marrying into J&K, the anti-woman charge does not stick. But that is precisely it, Mufti sahib! A daughter marries to go away. She is alienised. The daughter-in-law marries to come in. She is domiciled. No, Mufti sahib, your answer has to be a lot less insulting to intelligence.