Breaking the Cage

Srila Roy

Dissent, Volume 63, Number 4. Fall 2016, pp. 74-83 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2016.0077

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633238

Access provided by Indian Institute of Technology New Delhi (26 Jul 2017 10:23 GMT)
 Breaking the Cage
Srila Roy

On December 16, 2015, the third anniversary of the now infamous Delhi
gang rape case that prompted nationwide protests, about fifty Indian
women in Delhi took to buses at night. Their actions were replicated across
several other Indian cities, where women boarded different buses, sang
songs, shouted slogans, held up placards, and asserted, against the wisdom
of governments and families alike, that women should not be caged for
D issen t F all 2 0 1 6

their safety.
The cage is an appropriate metaphor for describing womens experi-
ences of public spaces in India. Whether in the rural hinterland or in urban
centers, Indian women of different castes, classes, and religions negoti-
ateto different degreeselaborate societal norms and restrictions on
their access to and mobility in the public sphere. Going out in public can
involve anything from being stared at to being stalked, raped, or beaten. But
most proposed solutions to this problem of public safety for women from
both families and governments have relied on restricting their movement
rather than addressing the root causes of misogyny and sexism. Encourage-
ment or coercion to stay at home, to remain in tightly regulated places like
womens hostels, to return home early, or to avoid taking public transport,
for example, are presented as cautious solutions to safety rather than as
further restrictions on womens freedom.
As elsewhere in the world, women in India are hardly safe at home
not only did reported cases of domestic violence increase by 134 percent
between 2003 and 2013, but more than 90 percent of rapes in the country
are committed by someone known to the victim, such as family members or
neighbors. Caging women in the name of safety also reflects cultural anxi-
eties about female sexualitythat women might act in sexually immodest
ways if they are let loose in the streets, thus bringing shame and disrepute
to their families. Keeping women safe, then, has become a way to control
the behavior of women according to morally and culturally acceptable ideas
of femininity rather than to protect their right to enter public spaces free of
harm or fear.

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 In Indias new economy, womens growing financial independence,
greater consumer power, and changing social roles have elicited a backlash
from conservatives. The current environment of Hindu nationalism, fueled
by the electoral victory of the BJP and Narendra Modi, has enabled danger-
ous, if absurd, right-wing campaigns built around conspiracy theories such
as the Love Jihad, in which Muslim men allegedly seduce Hindu girls to
convert them to Islam. The BJP-led government also refuses to criminalize
marital rape, arguing that the concept is not applicable to Indian culture.
But the same economic and political forces have also spawned a gen-
eration of young, metropolitan womens movements, who are finding new
ways to confront the issue of womens safety in public spaces in India. Local
and national feminist campaigns like Why Loiter, Blank Noise, Take Back the
Night Kolkata, and Pinjra Tod have begun to challenge mainstream argu-
ments about womens safety by asserting that womens freedom and rights
cannot be compromised in the name of protection. Together, they signify a
new direction for feminist activism in India.

Globally, India is better known for its mistreatment of women than for wom-

F eminis t S t ra t egies
ens resistance to such violence. It is only very recently that stock images of
female victimization have been replaced, in the domestic and international
media alike, with those of women protesting rape in large numbers in the
streets of major Indian metropolises, and even facing police brutalitytear
gas and water cannonsfor it. Mass protests broke out in Delhi in early 2013
following the gang rape and murder of a young student, Jyoti Singh Pan-
dey, in December 2012. These protests saw thousands of men and women
on the march not only in Delhi, but across India and in cities abroad. The
sheer scale of the anti-rape protests brought the issue of rape and violence
against women into the mainstream (evident, for instance, in the unprec-
edented round-the-clock coverage of the protests by news channels) such
that activists in other countries (like the United States and South Africa)
were left questioning when they would have their Delhi moment.
Although the 2012 anti-rape protests were unprecedented in terms of
scale and impact, they need to be contextualized within a longer history of
womens activismespecially around rape and other forms of sexual vio-
lencein post-independence India. Indeed, it was the rape of a fourteen-
year-old adivasi, or tribal, girl, Mathura, at the hands of two policemen while
in custody that galvanized the mainstream Indian womens movement in the
late 1970s. Womens groups appealed the decision of the Indian Supreme
Court after it initially acquitted the policemen on the grounds that Mathura
was lying and habituated to sexual intercourse. The Mathura rape case
eventually led to the amending of Indian rape law, so that the burden of
proof shifted from the accuser to the accused and custodial rape was made
a punishable offense. It marked the beginning of a slew of legal reforms that

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 would address domestic violence, sexual harassment, and rape including,
following the Pandey case, the 2013 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, which
recognizes a greater range of sexual offenses than before.
These two critical moments in the history of Indian feminismthe
Mathura case in the late 1970s and the Delhi rape in 2012therefore bookend
a long history of feminist interventions into the realm of the law and the state.
Yet critics argue that the strategy of legal reform has been limited. On a prac-
tical level, better laws have not improved the conviction rate for rape, which
is still only 17 percent in Delhi, largely due to the deeply ingrained misogyny in
the legal system and wider state apparatus. A new book titled Public Secrets
of Law: Rape Trials in India by one of Indias foremost feminist scholars, Pratik-
sha Baxi, provides ample evidence of the routine ways in which rape victims
are retraumatized by law enforcement officials and the medical community
due to their gender, as well as their class and caste background.
Generally speaking, the Indian state has never been an ally of feminism
and so the focus of the womens movement on state policy and law has pro-
duced mixed results. Feminist legal scholar Ratna Kapur argues that the
focus on legal strategies has invariably strengthened a law and order, crim-
inal justice framework as well as the security apparatus of the state. . . . It
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furthers a protectionist and paternalistic approach that has little to do with

respecting womens rights to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy. Addi-
tionally, legal reform has arguably done little to change wider societal per-
ceptions of the causes of violence against women, or challenge the pervasive
culture of victim-blaming that informs police and politicians alike.

It is in this context that new feminist initiatives, moving away from the
strictly legal strategy of the Indian womens movement, have emerged.
While some of these campaigns began after the 2013 anti-rape protests,
others emerged over the preceding decade. Throughout the 2000s, India
witnessed a number of public protests and vigils led by middle-class youth
in response to high-profile cases of violence against women. One such case
was the murder of Jessica Lall, a Delhi-based model who was shot dead by
Manu Sharma, the son of a politician, for refusing to serve him a drink at a
private party. The trial court first acquitted Sharma, but later convicted him
following an appeal backed by huge popular pressure. During this period,
there were also more explicitly feminist campaigns, like an Indian version of
the international Slut Walk marches against victim-blaming, and the Pink
Chaddi (or Pink Panty) campaign, which encouraged Indian women to mail
underwear to members of a right-wing group that had attacked women
drinking in a bar in Mangalore for being un-Indian.
Unlike these spontaneous and largely reactive moments of protest,
todays feminist campaignslike Why Loiter, Blank Noise, Take Back the
Night Kolkata, and Pinjra Todare organizing in a more developed and

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 F eminis t S t ra t egies
A Delhi woman holds up her Safe City Pledge as part of national campaign by Blank
Noise, April 2013. The sign reads, I pledge to travel in the general compartment of
the train, not only in the ladies compartment. I want the whole city to be safe. Photo
courtesy of Blank Noise.

sustained manner around similar issues. And unlike older feminist cam-
paigns around violence against womenwhose approach Ratna Kapur has
described as protectionist and paternalisticthese initiatives emphasize
womens unconditional freedom in the public domain, including the free-
dom to access and occupy public spaces without fear, and even to indulge
in risky behavior like purposeless loitering. This is the thesis of an impor-
tant book called Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (2011), co-
authored by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade. They write:

Turning the safety argument on its head, we now propose that what
women need in order to maximize their access to public space as
citizens is not greater surveillance or protectionism (however well
meaning), but the right to take risks. For we believe that it is only by
claiming the right to risk, that women can truly claim citizenship. To
do this we need to redefine our understanding of violence in relation
to public spaceto see not sexual assault, but the denial of access
to public space as the worst possible outcome for women.

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 As the book argues, the radical nature of the right to take risksto loi-
tercannot be underestimated. Not only is womens safety not assured by
placing greater restrictions on their mobility, it also cannot be achieved by
policing the behavior of the other working-class, migrant, or Muslim men
who are typically cast as the perpetrators of violence. Instead, the authors
insist that the right to loiter has the potential to change the terms of nego-
tiation in city public spaces and creat[e] the possibility of a radically altered
city, not just for women, but for everyone. Reclaiming public space in this
way does not, however, let the state off the hookthe authors simultane-
ously emphasize the need for structural changes like better public transport
and more developed city infrastructure.
Why Loiter is now a growing movement of the same name that was
started by a young Mumbai-based professional named Neha Singh in May
2014. Singh meets with other women on a weekly basis, during the day and
at night, to loiter in the streets of Mumbai, through activities like cycling
and taking public transport. Singh says they started out with two partici-
pants at the first session, and today, over 250 women attend Why Loiter
sessions.
The movement has (less active) strands in smaller Indian cities like
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Jaipur and Aligarh, and has also inspired a similar Pakistani campaign to
reclaim public spaces called Girls at Dhabas. When asked about the impact
of the Why Loiter movement, Singh said For me and for most others in the
group, the most striking change that has occurred is the gradual doing away
of any self-blaming. . . . In Indian girls this feeling is so internalized that we
mostly never even challenge the notion.
Before Why Loiter, there was Blank Noise, perhaps the first feminist
initiative to confront such ideas of victim-blaming in India by undertaking
consciousness-raising activities. Started by Jasmeen Patheja when she
was an art student in 2003, it has since grown into a larger campaign that
encourages mainly middle-class women and university students to chal-
lenge street sexual harassment and reclaim urban spaces using art and per-
formance. Blank Noise encourages these women to share personal stories
and experiences of street sexual harassment online. The campaign has also,
among other initiatives, invited women to submit photos of the clothing
they wore when they were harassed, as part of a participatory fact-build-
ing project to reject narratives of victim-blaming.
Another project organized by Blank Noise, Meet to Sleep, called on
women in various Indian cities like Bangalore, Jaipur, Delhi, Mumbai, and
Pune to nap in public parks, an activity that transgresses both gender and
class norms since respectable middle-class Indian women dont usually
sleep in the open, especially not in places like public parks, which are usually
occupied by working-class men. Blank Noise has also developed an interna-
tional network of volunteers or action heroes, who attempt to tackle street
harassment and change public attitudes towards sexual violence through

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various online and offline activities.
Similar groups have also grown at the local level. Take Back the Night
Kolkata, for example, organizes groups of women in Kolkata to occupy a
public space or take public transport at an unsafe hour, generally late at
night. Started by journalist Shreya Ila Anasuya and currently run by a stu-
dent, Upasana Agarwal, and transgender activist, Raina Roy, TBTNK tries to
address violence not only against women but also against other marginal-
ized groups, especially sexual minorities. Its core participants include indi-
viduals who identify as queer, trans, or gender-variant.
Pinjra Tod is a more recent campaign and one that has gotten the most
public attention so far. Started by female college students living in hos-
tels in Delhi, it soon spread to other Indian cities like Thiruvananthapuram,
Chennai, and Mumbai. Pinjra Tod was set up to demand greater freedom for
women living in hostels, which typically impose sexist rules, curfews, dress
codes, and and other restrictions on female tenants in the name of safety.
Through campaigns, investigations, and use of campus graffiti, Pinjra Tod
has pressured the Delhi Commission of Women into challenging discrimi-
natory practices against women at the citys twenty-three registered uni-
versities. It has also drafted guidelines and recommendations for how to

F eminis t S t ra t egies
address sexual harassment and violence on university campuses. Getting
a government authority to recognize sexism, and in turn hold universities
accountable, is a significant achievement of the campaign, which began
only last year.

In significant ways, the primarily middle-class, metropolitan character of

these movements has influenced both the kinds of issues they are taking
up as well as how they are choosing to do so. While activists in the Indian
womens movement have also always been middle-class, the anticolo-
nial and socialist roots of the movement meant that class was privileged
over all other social variables. This meant that issues such as sexuality or
street sexual harassmentcaptured by the misnomer eve-teasingwere
not taken up in a sustained manner or were dismissed as primarily middle-
class, and therefore less significant, concerns. In her book Queer Activism
in India (2012) anthropologist Naisargi Dave documents how leftist wom-
ens groups like the All-India Democratic Womens Association refused to
march with groups like the Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI) on Inter-
national Womens Day in 2000. By contrast, todays new feminist move-
ments are unapologetically mobilizing around issues that have particular
relevance to them, but they also argue that addressing these issues can
have wider implications across class. Their activismwhich adopts a more
intersectional approach to gender, class, and sexualityemerges out of and
responds to the deficiencies of the movements that came before them.
So what is new about these recent feminist campaigns?

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 First, it is the way in which they have politicized the issue of womens
public safety. Rather than wait for state authorities to make Indian cit-
ies safer for women, campaigns like Why Loiter and Blank Noise encour-
age women to claim spaces by and for themselves, to assert their right to
be in the city without shame, fear, or the threat of violence. For critics like
former participant Hemangini Gupta, Blank Noise represents the ways in
which contemporary feminists emphasize their own rights and desires as
entry points to their activism, as opposed to the older strategy of femi-
nists, which focused on law and policy changes and therefore held the state
responsible for addressing violence against women. But arguably, these
newer campaigns are actually forcing the Indian state to be morenot
lessaccountable to women. Currently, the failure of the state to ensure
womens safety has effectively already shifted the burden of protection
onto individual womensince they are invariably blamed for venturing into
unsafe spaces at unsafe times when they face violence or harassment.
By intentionally entering these very spacesas in the case of Why Loiter
and Take Back the Night Kolkatawomen are challenging, as Agarwal of
TBTNK said, the accountability that has been placed on us.
Second, the new campaigns are taking pains to show the wider impli-
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cations of the fight for womens public safety. In response to the claim that
street sexual harassment is an elitist issue, primarily affecting urban mid-
dle-class women, campaigners stress that public spaces in cities are full of
people who are vulnerable to violence not only because of their gender but
also for other reasons, such as their religion, class, caste, or sexuality.
Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Womens Asso-
ciation and, since 2012, a major feminist figure in India, explained the class
politics of the Why Loiter, Pinjra Tod, and Blank Noise campaigns:

To call them elitist would be to suggest that working-class women

are unconcerned with autonomy and access to public spaces. Noth-
ing could be further from the truth. The concerns that Pinjra Tod
raises are as applicable in college hostels as they are in hostels for
women workers. Why Loiter makes a break from defining working-
class men as the primary threat to womens safety; instead it calls
for the right of women of every class, as well as working-class men,
to loiter without having to show respectable cause.

Blank Noise similarly addresses how both class and caste shape
womens fears of sexual violence, especially the tendency of middle-class
women to only cast working-class men as potential predators. In one proj-
ect titled Talk to Me, Blank Noise staged a meeting between a woman and
a passer-by on a Bangalore street referred to as Rapist Lane in order to
bring together people not just divided by gender but also by class, caste,
and even language, in order to challenge their perceptions of safety and

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fear. Blank Noise is exploring fear through the lens of fear politics itself;
who we are taught to fear, how fear is transferred, inherited, and its rela-
tionship with caste-class. Meet to Sleep and Talk to Me, both are situated in
wanting to trust rather than be defensive, Patheja explained.
Although these exercises aim to confront the roots of fear, some partici-
pants have also expressed concerns about the risky nature of the activism
itself. Unlike student activism that primarily takes place on university cam-
puses, these campaigns are organized by individuals or small groups, usu-
ally through social media, and take place in public spaces, often deserted
or late at night. In the case of TBTNK activities, participants dont share a
sense of institutional security that being part of an organization or political
party might afford. With the government-supported attacks on students at
Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Hyderabad in early 2016,
there is also a real fear of state reprisals on any type of youth activism.
Third, while the reach of these fledgling campaigns may at present be
limited, they are attempting to be more inclusive. TBTNKs alliances with
transfeminist activists and organizations symbolize a new openness of
Indian feminists to issues of sexuality. As transgender issues have never
been a priority of the mainstream Indian feminist movement, and transgen-

F eminis t S t ra t egies
der people in India are often also poor and Dalit, TBTNK adopts an inter-
sectional approach to questions of public safety. Both Anasuya and Agarwal
emphasize the transformative potential of such alliances especially given
that transfeminist activists have raised questions of sexuality and identity as
well as class and caste.
Fourth, and finally, these new feminist initiatives aim to challenge
and change a pervasive culture of victim-blaming. As in so many cases in
other countries (most recently, the Stanford rape case in the United States),
women in Indiaacross the rural-urban divideare routinely blamed for sex-
ual crimes committed against them. In India this tendency was most starkly
on display when one of the accused in the Pandey rape case, Mukesh Singh,
told a British filmmaker: A decent girl wont roam around at 9 oclock at
night. A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy. More shockingly,
one of Singhs defense lawyers told the filmmaker that he would set his own
sister or daughter alight if she disgraced herself by engaging in acts like
pre-marital sex. Politicians too routinely blame women for the violence they
facepointing to how they dress, rather than factors like caste-based dis-
crimination, which plays a crucial role in Indian society. Lower-caste and
Dalit women are regularly subject to sexual violence in an effort to keep them
at the bottom of the social ladder. State authorities are deeply complicit in
perpetuating these hierarchies when they dismiss such crimes and blame
victims because of their caste. In one case of gang rape, a judge declared
that a high-caste man would not defile himself by raping a Dalit woman. In
the Mathura rape case, which also involved the rape of a lower-caste woman
by upper-caste men, the judge famously called Mathura a shocking liar.

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 Blank Noise members Meet to Sleep in a Bangalore park, November 2015. Photo
courtesy of Blank Noise.
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Needless to say, victim-blaming by police, judges, and politicians

directly influences the lack of legal redress for female victims of violence.
Years of feminist activism aimed at legal reform has not changed the wider
culture of blaming the victim or addressed the widespread tolerance for vio-
lence against women in India. This might explain why campaigns like Blank
Noise and Why Loiter are now focusing on this issue in particular.
While the approach of many of the campaigns might seem to favor indi-
vidual acts of resistance, cases where victims of rape have directly chal-
lenged victim-blaming in public suggest that such acts can have broader
consequences. Two very different women, Bhanwari Devi and Suzette Jor-
don, broke new ground by publicly coming forward to report sexual crimes.
As a poor Dalit woman working for the state government, Devi was raped
by five upper-caste men for trying to stop child marriage in a North Indian
village in 1992. Her willingness to speak out about the crime informed the
first Indian laws around sexual harassment in the workplace (since Devi was
raped while she was doing her job). Jordan, who in 2013 refused to hide
behind the anonymous label of the Park Street rape victim (victims of rape
cannot be publicly named according to Indian law), directly responded to
those who tried to defame her. Jordan was gang-raped in February 2012 and
was labeled a liar and a prostitute by various politicians including the states
chief minister. She reportedly retorted: How dare they call me a prostitute?
Even if I were one, should I get raped? A prostitute earns for her family. She
is not standing there for you to rape her. These two womenone rural and

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Dalit, the other urban and middle-classare now considered icons of the
Indian womens movement because their singular acts of courage not only
resulted in actual legal change but effectively challenged broader cultural
perceptions of rape and its victims.
Surely, the burden of changing Indias rape culture should not fall on
individual survivors; it is, after all, the states responsibility to guarantee
womens protection. Yet in India and other countries alike, state institutions
both perpetrate and perpetuate violence against womenfrom the ways in
which police and courts routinely dismiss charges of rape, to the systematic
use of sexual violence in counterinsurgency campaigns, as seen in Kashmir
and the northeastern states of India. Seeking the protection of the state,
therefore, cannot be the only solution for women.

The recent feminist mobilizations in India today cannot entirely be cel-

ebrated for their newnessthey build on the gains and respond to the
weaknesses of a long and vibrant history of womens rights activism in the
country. Nor can they be dismissed as elitistalthough their concerns and
tactics undoubtedly reflect their middle-class character, they are trying to

F eminis t S t ra t egies
show how their seemingly narrower concerns can have broader implications.
For instance, Why Loiter activists are trying to take the campaign out-
side its urban, middle-class context to attract more diverse voices. Neha
Singh of Why Loiter has collaborated with a Delhi-based NGO to examine
what loitering in rural spaces might mean for tribal women. Pinjra Tod
mobilized on behalf of ten (mostly Dalit, female) sanitation workers in Delhi
who were illegally dismissed by authorities because of their caste. Although
what such campaigns will ultimately achieve remains to be seenmany are
still in their infancythese modest efforts represent conscious attempts to
reach beyond the immediate demographic of the current movements.
The Indian womens movement historically set up a hierarchy of femi-
nist concerns that persists today. Poor, working-class women are almost
exclusively associated with material concerns of survival, whilst middle-
class women are assumed to have purely cultural concerns, such as
harassment, moral policing, or sexuality. But erecting such hierarchies has
left little room to consider how class, caste, sexuality, and gender together
shape all womens lives, and that to address these issues effectively, social
change will have to accompany legal reform. The promise of Indias new
feminist movements lies in the growing recognition that while movements
must hold the state accountable, our political visions and strategies must
go much further.

Srila Roy is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand,

South Africa, where she teaches postcolonial and transnational gender issues and wom-
ens movements in the global South.

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