It is not as if people do not know the law. Sometime in July last year, the landlady of a two-room tenement glanced across the yard to see the man of the house dragging his wife by the hair from the kitchen to the outer room, while continuously clubbing her back - from which her blouse now hung in tatters - with the wooden stand of a bonti. He was drunk in the middle of the morning and ceaseless in his abuse. The bleeding woman was desperately trying not to make a sound. The landlady immediately shouted for the neighbours and called the police.
In the insufficiently urbanized stretches along the eastern fringes of the city, neighbours are almost as important as in a village. They were sympathetic to the woman. Attached to a hiring centre, she worked as an attendant for homebound patients, and I came to know her a couple of months after this incident when I was confined to the bed. Her work - and an unending cycle of loans and repayment - accounted for the schooling of her three daughters, their clothes and food, the house-rent, electricity and whatever else was needed in the house.
The man, who earned quite a bit as workman and sub-contractor, did not contribute anything to the family; earlier, he would put in a hundred rupees a month, making it clear, with blows and abuses, that he was paying for his food. He spent his money on drink, on serial affairs - occasionally vanishing with a woman for months - and hid the rest of his money. Usually he came home to eat and to punch his wife. She now has swellings on her head where he has hit her repeatedly. He beat the girls too, till they grew up and either turned on him or escaped.
There is nothing unusual in the scene. We have no count of women who live this kind of life or similar ones. Often, as in this case, they have their neighbours' support, for they fit notions of 'goodness': this woman was seen to be honest, struggling, devoted to her daughters and trying to educate them, faithful to her husband, patient and meek. In this story, the police were helpful too. Although the man managed to run away and hide with his aunt in a nearby village, the police, through a couple of men in the station who knew him, forced him to come back.
The State's machinery for the punishment of domestic violence had worked smoothly at each step, from the landlady and neighbours through the police to the moment the law would be applied. The semi-rural society that surrounded the woman was not, of course, a formal arm of the State, but it replicated collectively the ideals of order, safety, gender, duty and morality that the State would find convenient. Now the law would take over. The police assured the battered wife that they would teach the man a lesson. They could hold him up to three months.
The woman reacted with terror. What would happen after three months, if that? Could the police save her from him then? They could, but she would have to let them know. But only she, not her daughters, let alone the police, knew what he was capable of. The memory of excruciating pain in every part of her body, of repeated blows with unceasing abuse, the unreasoning fear of more hurt accompanied by equally unreasoning shame - all these were hers alone. He would be more enraged when freed. She did not want the law 'to take its course'.
The fear of the justice that the State was willing to offer her sprang from her rejection of the accepted notion of correctability. Violence cannot be cured by more violence, whatever official guise it comes in. But if the woman knew this, as do thousands of other women like her, certainly the State, the true specialist in violence, knows it too. What is the function, then, of the laws against domestic violence?
There was another angle to the woman's retreat. Her neighbours, who had acted as her protectors, had wished to ensure that her husband got a slap on the wrist. Had the man been locked up, and the case gone to trial, the situation would have changed subtly, gradually bringing out the woman's agency. When, instead of protecting his wife, a husband is seen to hurt her, the good folk next door take up the task of protection. They 'stand in' for the husband, exercising the mastery that comes with protection. They are not just saving the woman, they are also saving the marriage; they are imposing control. For her, they are 'society'. It is not expected that the woman would wrest this control from them, and she, too, knows that their goodwill, which she thinks she needs, depends on her continued 'goodness'.
Their hands tied, the police asked her to get the neighbours to talk to him - conduct a shalishi, in other words, that peculiar phenomenon in which the State comes to the doorstep in plain clothes - and to report to the station about his behaviour after three months. She had to go rushing back to them with a fresh complaint before three months were over, while she was working for me. But once again, she stopped them from taking action.
What I am looking at is a tiny segment of time in one woman's life among thousands of similar ones. The women I am referring to can, most of them, drop their violent husbands and set up house on their own. If they pay for their children's schooling as well as house rent, electricity and so on, what is to stop them?
Much of the terror of having an enraged husband return from a lock-up springs from the fact that the woman keeps living in the same house. True, it is her legal right; a violent husband cannot be allowed to drive her away. But rights are less palpable than daily battering. Yet the woman, although capable of living on her own, often holds on to this other right unknowingly and stays on. She fears that a woman on her own with children, maybe with growing daughters, is unsafe in any locality - if she gets a place for rent at all. Can society or the law prove that such a perception is ill-founded? On the contrary, this perception is reinforced by social attitudes towards - and unashamed exploitation of - an underprivileged working woman bringing up her family alone. The fear that a husband addicted to violence will vengefully seek out the relocated family is actually less keen than this other fear. It is better to have the man come home drunk and uncontrollable than have no man at all.
This, of course, is not the whole picture. It is heartening to know that society is changing in spite of fears, attitudes and resistances, that the tireless efforts of activists are bearing fruit. Yet violence in the home is still widespread. (I am not bringing in rape outside the family or the intricate relationship of violence with the ordering and self-expression of a society.) Just looking at violent husbands, we need to ask, could I go to the law so that my husband is cured of his violence, maybe bringing about a penalty after trial, and then live happily ever after with a 'corrected' husband after his release from a correctional home? To go back to the earlier question, what is the function of laws against domestic violence?
For many women who survive their spouses' reckless battering from day to day, following the law to the culmination of its procedures would mean losing the marriage, the State-sponsored shelter without which she is virtually banished with her children into a vast grey hinterland of frightening possibilities. Activists and organizations may help her, of course, but we need to look at those without access to either. The law against domestic violence is double-edged in effect. Can the State, assuming its good faith, achieve anything here more than a slap on the wrist of the unrepentant offender?
Marriage is sustained by laws, but a supposedly affective relationship between two individuals at its core is expected to take the sting out of its economic, legal, social, and generally quietly coercive aspects. Violence in the home is peculiarly intimate; it is a terrifyingly personal act. It shows up the irreconcilability of law and personal relationships, and, paradoxically, becomes more intractable when protected by the institutional armour of marriage. A habitually violent spouse exposes the carefully arranged contradictions on which society balances itself. The informal and formal protective arms that the State extended to the woman who looked after me also imprisoned her.
To confront the elephant in the room: how can we stop sexual and domestic violence? Can we? Is it that the State has failed in its duty of education, hence it is now failing to protect its most treasured first unit, marriage? But are violence and education mutually exclusive? And what about violence itself? Where does it come from?
This reflection is not on violence, but on violent husbands. To stop them, perhaps we have to address the sources of violence in ways that will help make the implementation of laws against domestic violence less ambiguous, and protection less imprisoning.
