Why Do Women’s Bodies Become Sites Of War, And Caste And Communal Conflicts?

TW: Sexual violence against women

A fiercely political chapter in Megha Majumdar’s recent bestseller, ‘A Burning’, follows a group of enraged men as they storm towards the house of a Muslim man, suspected of committing the ‘unthinkable’ – consuming beef. As they violently and forcefully enter his house, destroying everything they see, they also take it upon themselves to set the record straight and to punish his wife for his alleged offences. Majumdar paints an accurate picture of their inner monologue – “Our people, the true people of this nation, are a flood of cleansing water, our arms and legs full of muscles which grab and swing, our grip never more certain than when it closes around the resistant throat of the man’s wife. Never more certain than when it stretches open her leg.

Just like that, on the whims and fancies of a group of entitled men, a woman is violated in a way that can never be forgiven, yet is almost never questioned in the first place. Self-proclaimed righteous men who were out to save the dignity of their holy, sacred mother, considered it perfectly fine to rape a woman on their way. And not an eyebrow was raised. Not a muscle flinched. 

 This tale, of women’s bodies becoming convenient sites for men to wage their wars, is not a new one – in fiction or in reality. 

Also read: Sexual Violence And Rape: The Anatomy Of Reaction

The much talked-about Prime Video’s Paatal Lok has a similarly disturbing visual. A feud between men from different castes, sparked by upper-caste men tormenting the other, eventually concludes with a woman from the disadvantaged caste being raped and sexually assaulted by a group of men from the so-called ‘upper caste’. It was depicted as their route to revenge, their way to justice. Similar, violent images are seen in portrayals of war everywhere, among the most infamous portrayals in popular culture being how Dothraki men rape women while pillaging villages in Game of Thrones. They transpire just as brutally outside the screens. What happened in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora, in Kashmir in 1991 is enough proof of that. Units of the Indian security forces allegedly mass-raped the women of their villages – the women’s bodies thus becoming sites for the assertion of political agenda.

Men often go to war and take up arms for reasons created in their heads and propagated in the world – like their violent need to protect a species of animals; or their staunch belief that a person from a caste they consider low should never dare to fight back; or across the borders, as trajectories of India-Pakistan partition indicate, because of religious extremist tendencies. And whenever they do, women end up becoming mere pawns, their bodies violated, especially because of the patriarchal, deeply-entrenched belief that women are the markers of each community and are the repositories of the honour and dignity of the communities they belong to. So, in the 2002 Godhra carnage when a Hindu mob gang-raped a pregnant Bilkis Bano, it was a) an assertion of the Hindu masculinity to emasculate the Muslim men as incapable of protecting their women, b) as a mockery of the honour of the Muslim community. Women’s bodies become mere pawns in masculine narratives of nationalism.

Yet, the women whose rapes would be dismissed as “collateral damage” in military parlance, would never receive statuses of honour for dying or sacrificing their bodies in the battle. More often than not, these violent acts go unreported, unregistered, unremembered. In the book ‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield’ Christina Lamb has collected stories from women who have been victims of such violence, and these accounts are widespread. From being taken as sex slaves by the ISIS members to being incessantly sexually abused in refugee camps, women everywhere have gone through absolute turmoil when men decide to wage wars. Women become currency in wars, being traded as business deals, awarded to men for their wartime labour. 

The use of rape as a tool of oppression, humiliation and control is not limited to wars and conflict zones. In our everyday lives, it is manifested in the way men from different communities rape women from the other as a way of asserting their dominance over the community, and this problem is all-pervasive. Dalit women are raped by upper-caste men who think they are “putting them in their place”. Relatively-privileged women are not spared either. In her essay ‘The Masculinization of Wealth’, Gloria Steinem points out how socialist revolutionaries treat women as an extension of their husband or father’s class, subjugating them for being from the upper class. Men who were considered revolutionaries, like Norman Mailer, who wrote ‘An American Dream’, portrayed women from wealthy families being raped as a form of justified fight against the powerful men these women were considered to belong to. Forget that, two men having a verbal face-off pepper their spat with abuses that indicate raping each other’s daughter, mother and sister.

Adamant as they are on using wars, battles and other tools of violence to resolve disputes, the men in power (and they are almost always men) taking these decisions do little to ensure that sexual violence is kept out of these matters. Which is why, a feminist, more empathetic leadership is more important than ever. A country that is preparing for war will take away the resources allocated for social benefits such as healthcare, food security, education etc., the impact of which will directly or indirectly be on women. Thus, not only is sexual violence against women an obvious consequence of war and fascist, communal forces at play, it also impinges on other factors that benefit marginalised sections of the community, including women.

Also read: Infographic: Sexual Violence In Conflict

It is bad enough that men have created war and war-like situations. It is bad enough that they use brutality to sort conflicts and consider it justified. It is bad enough that they have created tyrannical structures. And it is disheartening that they want to continue to stick to these ways. Further, women have been made the centre of these battles and the sites of these violent acts since time immemorial, even though these were men’s wars to begin with. When will women be released of this all-pervasive, unsolicited burden?

Vara Raturi is a 21-year-old student, writer and researcher. An Ambedkarite feminist, she studies at Sophia College for Women, Mumbai. Her research interests span through feminism, psychology, philosophy, literature and culture. She works as an actor and curator with Mumbai-based theatre groups D for Drama and The Company Theatre. You can find her on Instagram as well as here.  

Featured Image Source: Marva M, Feminism In India