The Equator Line 22 | January – March 2018 | Volume 6 Issue 1

Editor in Chief Bhaskar Roy

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 CONTENTS
Editorial 3
Those Who Did Not Die Ankita Anand 7
The Wake for Damini Anubhav Kumar Das 20
The Criminal Inside Us Vijay Raghavan 28
Rape of the White Woman in
Goa: An Inquest Albertina Almeida 41
Why Do They Rape? Sanjay Chugh 54
Rape Cargo from Tinsel Town Bhargabi Das 65
The Battered Woman Who
Once Slayed Demons Usha Hayes 76
Politics of the Woman’s Body Karen Gabriel 86
The First Target in Conflict
Situations Humra Quarishi 98
The Fiery Actor and Her
Contract Offenders K Kunhikrishnan 107
The Absent Narrative of
the Victim PK Vijayan 118
Reimagining the Mauled Body Punyabrata Pattrea 131
FICTION

I Was Not Alone Taha Kehar 136

Cover design and drawings: Punyabrata Pattrea

Photography: Editorial Indiapicture
 THE ABSENT NARRATIVE
118 OF THE VICTIM
Prem Kumar Vijayan

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C
onsider this: according to the National Crime Record
Bureau (NCRB), in India, a woman is raped every 14
minutes. That’s four women every hour – and inci-
dentally, one of those, every four hours, is gangraped.
Which means about six gangrapes a day; that is about 80 women
raped every day, about 560 women raped every week, about 2400
women every month, and about 28,800 raped every year. This
is an average: actually, the figures have been consistently on the
rise – from 2,487 rapes reported in 1971 to 34,651 in 2015. By
the way, this does not include the reports of rapes of minors (or
children) – which, in 2015, touched 10,854.

The fact that these are the reported figures is significant: studies
estimate that, actually, about 90 per cent of all rapes in the coun-
try go unreported every year. So, for instance, the total number
of rapes in 2015, by this estimate, would be around 3,40,000.
This does not include the figures for either marital rapes – which
are not cognized by the law in India – or for failed rape attempts.
According to the NCRB then, there is a failed rape attempt every
two hours – 12 a day, and about 4032 failed rape cases a year. If
we assume that failed rape attempts are even less likely to be re-
ported – or at least, as unlikely – then the actual number of failed
attempts could be higher than 40,000 a year, on average. In other
words, every year, nearly four lakh women in India are subjected
to either rape or attempts to rape (again, not including marital
rapes). Applying the figure of 90 per cent unreported again, to
cases of rape of minors, we can estimate that, on average, another
1,20,000 rapes, this time of minors, also take place. Taking all this

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into account, we probably average about five lakh rapes in India

every year (again, not including marital rapes).

Consider this too: only 28 per cent of the reported cases result
in conviction. That is, of the nearly four lakh incidents of either
rape or attempted rape, only about 8,000 in all – a mere two
per cent – are convicted. And finally consider this: the number
of rapes invariably goes up during civil conflicts, especially those
that witness armed action (whether by state or non-state forces)
against civilians. As such conflicts proliferate and spread to newer
areas in most parts of the world, this kind of rape too is becoming
commonplace.

Just to put these figures into a roughly clarifying perspective: ac-

cording to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implemen-
tation, around 1.7 lakh people died of traffic accidents in 2014.
That is, a woman is roughly four times more likely to be raped
than to die in a road accident. Considering that India ranks quite
high (rank 64, to be precise), globally, among countries with high
mortality rates for road accidents, this speaks volumes for the vul-
nerability of women to rape in India.

This is one kind of narrative about rape. Like all statistical nar-
ratives, these too focus on conveying a sense of the magnitude
and dimensions of the matter – how prevalent, how frequent, its
proportions (in relation to other comparable phenomena) are, its
locations and arenas, its agents and victims. Let’s call this kind the
‘objective narrative’ of rape.

ANOTHER KIND OF RAPE NARRATIVE

Although rapes have been happening in all likelihood from time

immemorial, through most of this history, and in most (patriar-
chal) places, they have been cognized as crimes against men – i.e.
the men to whom the raped women ‘belonged’, whether as moth-
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 THE ABSENT NARRATIVE OF THE VICTIM

Primavera: a large panel painting in tempera paint by the Italian Renaissance

painter Sandro Botticelli

er, wife, daughter, sister, servant, slave – and not against the raped
women themselves. It is only around the 16th century in Europe,
that this change in the law – from property to person – took
place, and rape began to be legally understood as a crime against
the violated women themselves. This change in understanding co-
incided roughly with the transition from feudalism to capitalist
social formations of one kind after another – mercantile to impe-
rial to industrial to finance.

The growing concern over rape during this period is evident from
Shakespeare’s work (e.g. The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus,
Pericles, The Tempest); to the Jacobean playwrights of the seven-
teenth century (e.g. John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Bonduca, The
Tragedy of Valentinian, The Queen of Corinth; Tomas Middleton’s
The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Maiden’s Tragedy; Thomas Heywood’s
version of The Rape of Lucrece); to the efflorescence of representa-
tions of rape in the various genres of 18th century literature, but
especially in the emergent genres of the novel (e.g. Samuel Rich-
ardson’s Clarissa); and in pornography (e.g. John Cleland’s Fanny
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The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, a painting by Peter Paul Rubens

Hill). With the literature of the more conservative 19th century,

however, these bold, even explicit engagements with rape came to
be rendered (if at all) occasionally, indirectly, and rather euphe-
mistically (e.g. in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles) – with
some very important exceptions.

The first of these exceptions is in colonial narratives recounting

the (sexual) encounters of (white) Europeans with the (black or
coloured) ‘natives’ of the various lands conquered by the former
(perhaps the most famous of these being E M Forster’s A Passage to
India). The second of these exceptions is closely related to the first,
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perhaps in fact just a variation on it – the narratives of slave rapes.

These are mostly in and from the colonies: in the slave narratives
of the American South, from the United States, for instance, rape
of black women by white men was seen as routine, normal, be-
cause these women – like all slaves – had no more status, value or
rights than any inanimate property.

The rape of white women by black men, however, was a matter

of great concern, and became the stuff of much fiction and poet-
ry, in tones of fear and loathing, as much as repressed curiosity,
desire and fascination. This particular pattern of racialized sexual
violence is evident in the earlier kind of exception too: whether
from India, South East Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean, the same
normalcy is applied to rape by white men; and the same combina-
tion of fear and desire is evident towards rape by black or coloured
men. Some of these concerns continued into the 20th century, in
Caribbean literature of the early 20th century, for instance; or in
the post-Raj Raj novels. But the very persistence of these themes
and concerns dealing with racialized sexual violence tells us of the
enormous impact of colonialism on sexual relations, as much as
on community identities – whether racial, ethnic, regional, na-
tional or religious. In fact, it would be safe to say that the emer-
gence of rape as a particular form of exercising communal supe-
riority, widely prevalent today – in ethnic conflicts, communal
riots, religious animosities – is directly derived from this colonial
history of sexualized ‘othering’.

The emergence of such perceptions – i.e. of community identity

as sexualized, and of sexual relations as determined by community
identities – as well as the narratives that reinforced those percep-
tions, coincided with the emergence of the modern bureaucrat-
ic nation-state. These perceptions and their narratives were thus
inevitably shaped by, and in turn profoundly influential on, the
emergent political formation of the nation-state and its policies
– its imperial ambitions, its feminization of the nation, its mascu-
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linization of the state, as well as the frequently gendered terms in

which power itself was exercised – and not just in the colonies, but
in the relations between the classes, in the home country. These
were the very terms that allowed narratives of imperial conquest
and colonization to be framed as ‘rapes’ of nations.

The idea that a nation could be ‘raped’ and ‘ravaged’ is of course

not new. It owes substantially perhaps, to the early medieval mean-
ings of ‘rape’ – as ‘booty’, or ‘forceful seizure’; ‘plundering’, ‘rob-
bery’, ‘extortion’ (Online Etymology Dictionary). The association
of the word with sexual violence towards women begins slightly
later, around the middle of the fifteenth century. This meaning
gains traction very slowly: till as late as the 18th century, its use in
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock for instance, could register
both, the older meaning as well as the later, sexual one.

However, as the nation-states emerging during this period began

to consolidate as political formations, nationalism also emerged
with a new meaning, often celebrating the personification of the
nation as female (e.g. ‘Britannia’, ‘Germania’, ‘Europa’ – and of
course, our very own ‘Bharat Mata’). This is as much a sign of the
eroticization of territory, possession and property, as it is of the
reinforcement of the understanding of women and femininity as
property. However, since the object of desire is the shared and
very public female persona of the nation, ‘she’ cannot be imagined
as (exclusively owned) sexual object. Hence the almost ubiqui-
tous characterization of this female persona of the nation as either
goddess or mother (or both): this is one of the few ways in which,
within patriarchy, multiple males can relate intimately to a single
female.

The correlations between territory, property, community, vio-

lence, femininity and sexuality in these constructions, is one of
the main reasons why, in many literatures – and in their languages
themselves – rape is referred to euphemistically as the ‘theft’ or
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The Rape of Proserpina by Hendrick van Balen

‘loss of honour’ – as for instance in the Urdu phrase ‘izzat loot-

na’. ‘Loss of honour’ here actually registers the man’s humiliation
in quite a wide semantic range: in being unable to protect ‘his’
women from being violated; in the despoliation of ‘his property’
(i.e. ‘his ‘property’ has now been ‘owned’ and used by an-‘other’
man); in ‘his property’ subsequently ‘betraying’ him by bearing
and birthing the child of that ‘other’ man; in the suggestion that
‘she wanted it’, but he was not ‘man enough’ to give it, while his
‘other’ was; and so on.

Rarely, if ever, in literary history, does this range of meanings

of rape-as-humiliation extends to the victim’s (whether woman,
child or man) own experience of it – at least, not till the 19th cen-
tury. This is partly of course, because most women were not liter-
ate till about the 18th century, and could not have recorded their
experiences in writing anyway. But the fact is that even a wom-
an’s speech about the experience of rape is not tolerated – recall
the figure of Shakespeare’s Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, raped and

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then mutilated, her tongue and hands cut off so she cannot ‘speak’
in any way. The more substantial part of the problem then is the
relentless refusal of patriarchal formations to recognize women
as subjects with voices of their own, as agents in their own right
– a problem that the vast majority of women, around the world,
whether literate or not, continue to face.

One inevitable consequence of this was that, when women who

experienced sexual abuse of any kind – which would, again, prob-
ably include the vast majority of women around the world – even-
tually began registering and recording their experiences, they did
so with a strong sense of victimhood, many of them seeing them-
selves as victims. In fact, victimhood came to define women and
femininity so strongly that it began to get challenged only in the
literature and other feminist writings of the 20th century, as too
limited an understanding. Curiously, this perspective of them-
selves – i.e. as defined by victimhood – effectively led to its con-
verse, viz., victimhood itself as feminine. And in a peculiar twist
to this, the raped woman’s man experiences ‘his’ woman’s rape as
his victimhood more than hers, and therefore, perceives rape as
leading to his feminization, or at least, de-masculinization. This
is particularly true of rape literature that is intersected by other
factors, like race for instance – a classic example being Richard
Wright’s novel Native Son.

It is not surprising then, that most individual rapes, in most parts

of the world, are simply not reported (as opposed to mass rapes,
which cannot be hidden or denied easily – and where, in any case,
the rapes can be represented as violations of the community). If
they are, it is in the depersonalized legalese of crimes against the
state, not as an account of the victim’s experience. Discussions
around rape that do vocalize the experiences of the victims, usu-
ally anonymize them, which means that some important specific-
ities of the experience are lost. This leads, on the one hand, to a
situation in which, although the victims are able to vocalize their
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particular experience of the rape itself, anonymization returns it

to silence, and ensures that only a generic narrative of the experi-
ence grows around rape; and, on the other, to the articulation and
exploration of these issues mainly through literature, especially
fiction.

These developments had a rather peculiar outcome: since repre-

sentations of the experience of rape exist predominantly in fic-
tion, and in literature in general, and since there is not much
actual documentation by victims, rape has arguably acquired an
unwarranted aura of drama, even sensationalism, about itself. If
fiction has served to bring rape into public discussion, it has also
served to increase the dubiousness of its accounts, because of the
paucity of actual accounts of rape to measure the fiction by. This
is aggravated by the common imagination of rape, prevalent espe-
cially in pornography, as if pleasurable for its victims. It is further
exacerbated by near-soft-porn romances like the Mills and Boon
series, that often celebrate the theme of strong, defiant women
succumbing to predatory, persistent, even violent seductions by
forceful men.

Thus, the silence around the experience of rape is reinforced by

the excess of fiction (in porn or otherwise) that represents it as
enjoyable for the victim. Hence the peculiar situation, wherein
the victim of rape has to prove that she did not want to be raped,
or ask for it, or even consent to it. The rape victim’s narrative is
already compromised by the prejudice that her sexuality, rather
than the rapist’s aggression, is responsible for the assault on her.
‘Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes’ – is one of the oldest
and most widely believed (even if not legally accepted) justifica-
tions for unwanted sex – or rape. Further, she exposes herself to
speculation that even if she did not ask for it, the fact that she
was raped suggests that she may prove easy prey, and be targeted
by more potential offenders. Her narrative is thus not only ‘auto-
matically’ unreliable, it serves as a titillating fantasy, if not as an
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invitation to further rape.

This is another kind of rape narrative – or rather, as we shall call

it, a ‘narrative about the narratives’ of rape.

A THIRD KIND OF RAPE NARRATIVE –

THE ABSENT KIND

Another narrative that assumes crucial importance in the life of a

people is about ‘political’ rapes, e.g. in conflict situations; or, nar-
ratives about the ‘rape’ of a community, or nation. These two are
in fact related: it is as if the desire for (victory and conquest over)
the ‘other’ nation (or community) is an inevitable outcome of the
proscribed and tabooed desire for the mother or goddess that a
people imagine their country to be. The eroticization of conquest
is thus enacted, with almost tragic fatality, as rape – as if, by a kind
of metonymic extension and inversion, violation of the women
of the ‘other’ nations (or communities) was effectively to rape the
female personifications of these nations, and hence perhaps the
nations themselves.

I want to look briefly at the most important kind of narrative of

all, the absent narrative – that of the victim. The ‘objective nar-
rative’ of statistics gives us a sense of the scale on which rapes are
occurring; the corresponding scale of the victims’ silence, is equal-
ly astounding. Victim accounts are of course not entirely absent;
there are a few memoirs, testimonies and other such first-person
accounts of rape as they experienced it. Having been sexually
abused by a male relative, as a child, I perhaps empathize with the
women in these narratives more willingly than critically. But per-
haps that is exactly what is needed for these narratives: empathetic
reading, especially by men.

However, the problems confronting such narration are sever-

al-fold: the biggest, perhaps toughest one is the rape-narrative in
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pornography. Because rape has been repeatedly and voluminously

written about, in enthusiastic detail, in porn – but as if it were
by the victim – the language of rape has itself become pornogra-
phized. There is the real danger then, that even such narratives –
i.e. first-person records of actual rapes – will be read as titillation,
as porn. It will be read with the eyes of the rapist. And the victim
may well feel that each such reader is merely re-living her rape,
raping her again with each reading; and perhaps more crucially,
that by narrating her experience, she may be giving potential rap-
ists a taste of how it would be, what they could expect, how they
would experience it. And she may then decide to stay silent.

But unless they break that silence, the porn narrative of rape will
be the dominant one. The ‘objective narrative’, as well as the lit-
erary accounts that I outlined above in the ‘narrative about the
narratives’, will continue to be produced, of course – but with
little impact on the phenomenon of rape. As long as the victim
narratives do not come out and make it clear that ‘No!’ does not
mean ‘Yes!’; that a woman may desire without giving her consent;
that she (just like any man) may choose to stop sexual intercourse
at any time, even after penetration with her consent; that insisting
on continuing with sex even after that, is rape; that, contrary to
the reams of dreams spun by porn, the pursuit, stalking, coercion
and humiliation of women is not something they all – in fact,
probably a very minuscule minority – enjoy; that a woman’s attire
is not in itself an invitation to being sexually used; that male rel-
atives are not any safer – in fact are often more predatory – than
the average male stranger; and so on – unless these myths are
exploded, the imagination around rape will continue to be domi-
nated by the pornographic one.

On the other part, it is vital for men to, not so much sympathize
as empathize, with women’s experiences of sexual harassment, vio-
lation and rape. This cannot happen unless the enormous volume
of words celebrating sexual violence is pushed back, and more
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and more about the traumatic experience of rape enters public

debates and discourses, to replace the pornographic as the every-
day perspective on rape. Of course, this is not the only action
needed to confront the enormous, and not often even recognized,
misogyny at the heart of rape as a phenomenon; there are vari-
ous other forms of patriarchal oppression, repression, exploitation
and gender violence that are interlinked with, and help reinforce,
the prevalence of rape. But if rape is concealed in silence, then
these other kinds of oppression and coercion can only gain from
that: the more that silence is broken, the more the connections
between those other forms of gender violence and sexual violence
will become clear. n

Dr PK Vijayan has written extensively

on Hindu nationalism and masculine
expressions in imagining nationhood.
His book on Gender and Hindu
Nationalism is being published by
Routledge, UK. He teaches English at
Hindu College, Delhi University.

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