This article has been written by Ms. Nandhini Sasikumar, a 3rd year of BA LLB Student from The Central Law College, Salem.
INTRODUCTION:
Honor is the most cherished value in the India sub-continental patriarchal families irrespective of the caste, of the caste, regional and religious identities. Families gain and lose honor through money, power and improper behavior of women. Actions appropriate according to dharma maintain the purity and honor of the family, lineage and caste while the inappropriate ones defile it. Emphasis on family honor is basic to the Indian social framework since the family still constitutes a very potent force in the social structure.
The ideology of honor being a gendered notion in India, both men and women embody notions of honor in totally different ways. Woman is the repository of the family honor as a daughter, wife and mother while man regulates it. The greater threat to this honor lies in the woman, in her body, conduct due to her reproducing and procreating capacity. Honor is presumed to be female-linked commodity coupled with the male prerogative to ensure that she does not jeopardize in delicate balance at any cost. As a girl grows up, burden of shame accompanying her femaleness makes it difficult for her to be proud of her body.
Being the repository of the family and caste honor, a woman is rendered an object of protection and violence at the same time. The fear of losing this honor makes the men rationalize and justify masculine aggression and violence against her. Violence against her within the four walls of the house in the capacity of a daughter, sister, wife and mother is widely accepted and legitimized under the patriarchal order and ultimately transcends caste divisions. Violence against her a public face and is always committed in response to the cultural expectations of the larger community. Even if the family wishes, it is not allowed to settle the matter of inter-caste marriages amicably but is compelled to treat it as a matter of honor by the community which is ready to take over if the family is unwilling, thereby forcing the family to sacrifice their daughters in the collective interests of the caste group. Thus, the concept of honor operates at the cost of human sentiments and values.
MAIN CONTENT:
- INTER CASTE MARRIAGES IN INDIA:
In spite of strict caste endogamous rules in India, inter-caste marriages are a regular feature. Inbreeding among different castes or varnas, known as sankarat sarvarnam, jati-sankara or varna-sankara was a common feature in ancient India. This is evident from Manusmriti which deals elaborately with the rules relating to marriage among the mixed castes in Chapter III. Manu allowed a woman to choose her own partner only if her parents failed to arrange her marriage within three years of her attaining puberty.
The rules of marriage within the caste were established in the post Aryan period when caste because hereditary. Though women enjoyed equal rights in selecting marital partner in the Vedic period, the parents exercised great control in this regard. Festive gatherings called as Samanas provided ample opportunity of love-making to the young men and women ending in marriage. Kshatriya brides enjoyed the right of selecting consorts in svayamvaras.
In the post-vedic period, the rights and privileges of women came to be restricted. In the fifth century A.D., selection of partners by the girls without being authorized by their guardians was regarded as unmannerly. After the 10th Century A.D., they came to be further disapproved due to the widening cultural differences between the Brahmanas and the other castes. Amidst conflicts and opposition, instances of inter-caste, inter-religious marriages have been on the rise in the post-colonial India due to westernization and woman empowerment. Though these marriages are constitutional, there exists no social acceptance for them.
- HONOR CRIMES IN INDIA:
Prohibition of inter-caste, inter-religious, intra-gotra marriages, inter and intra-regional marriages are an indication of forcible imposition of the male dominated hierarchical particularly rigidly segmenting the whole mankind into various mutually rival groups. The concepts of “honor” and “shame” operate to restore the male dominance which is presumed to have been compromised and endangered by the post-colonial legal empowerment of woman in India.
As defined by Abu Odeh, honor crime is the killing of a woman by her father or brother for engaging in or being suspected of engaging in sexual practices before or outside marriage and includes different types of manifest violent behavior against her like assault, confinement, imprisonment, interference with choice in marriage, declaring her to be minor and insane including her brutal murder. Gender based violence against women is defined as violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman and affects her disproportionately. By invoking the twin notions of honor and dishonor, the families try to regulate the inappropriate behavior of the woman. What is sacred and inviolable is izzat or ghariat i.e. honor and it is always presumed to be justified to kill and the die for honor. An action to uphold honor or izzat is always a male prerogative while women may only incite action. Since inter-caste marriages tend to weaken the differences existing among the different caste groups and disturb the caste hierarchies, marriage or a love affair between a high caste girl and a low caste boy is always contested and criminalized. Even the police and the judiciary at times act as mute spectators and passive supporters of the honor protectors.
The punishment for violating the rule of endogamy and exogamy is expulsion, excommunication from the caste, the killing of the mother and child and even sometimes ritual death. The rules of excommunication are horrendous since no one would dine, drink, transact economically with the outcaste, the barber would not shave him, the Brahman would refuse to officiate religious functions for him, no man would marry his children and the attendants of the dead would refuse to perform the funeral rites. In Northern India, particularly in the Haryana region, young persons are challenging the caste and kinship ideologies upheld by the senior male members of the caste by breaching the sexual codes and taboos, by defying demands of caste status, hypergamy and village exogamy and are thereby, discarding the notions of honor. Elopement of the young couples in love in defiance of their family, caste-village customs and sentiments result in direct violence perpetrated by the male family members on them and more particularly on the girl. Breach of the caste and community moral norms, family and kinship codes by a woman leads to greater social pressure and protest since it is treated as a direct attack on the patriarchal power and is deemed fit to be crushed, controlled and channeled. Women’s respectability determines that of the men, family and the whole caste.
Whenever, a young couple elopes after marriage or for marrying, usually the girl’s family tries to criminalize their action and contest the validity of the marriage. It is alleged that the girl is a minor and charges of kidnapping, abduction, wrongful confinement or rape is slapped against her husband and his family members for harassing them. For the loss of their family’s honor, the honor of the offending family is attacked. This strategy is adopted to force the married couple to surface or to withdraw from the much disputed marriage. After surfacing, in majority of the cases, they run the risk of humiliation, physical injury, death and decisions of caste panchayats. Death penalty is regarded a valid method of retrieving the lost honor. At times, the woman is pressurized by her family to support their case of kidnapping or is sometimes solitarily confined by the family members or is sent to the state run protective homes. On the contrary, no stigma attaches to the perpetrators of the honor crimes by the society who are absolved of their guilt on the premise that sacrificing the natural bonds of love and kinship for preserving and restoring honor purifies the family.
Rampant in North India, honor crimes are slowly showing their ugly lead even in other parts of the country. Failing to resist effectively due to their filial values and familiarity with the perpetrator, Indian women have been the victims of humiliation, torture and exploitation and face the risk of the worst violence, terror, deprivation, discrimination and devaluation. Moreover, violence and crimes behind ‘closed doors’ hardly leaves any remedy for them. Preservation of family honor at all costs results into her safety, choices and rights being compromised.
- TERRORIZING THE SOCIAL SCENCE – KHAP PANCHAYATS:
Panchayat, the governing body of each caste in India, enforces conduct appropriate to the caste. The caste and village councils exercise complete control on an individual’s conduct. Being a part of the socio-political life of village communities, they are informal, decision-making, caste based bodies consisting of the elderly and wise men drawn from their respective castes. They are mostly dominated by the land-owning class and the upper caste members who are not elected or self-appointed but are the members by consensus of the community and sometimes hold the post by heredity. Since caste perpetuates through the institution of marriage, the dominant caste in the region arrogates to itself the power or regulating the marriage behavior of the endogamous groups.
Khap panchayat, an endogamous, clannish institution, usually a Jat body exists around Delhi, some parts of Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and the adjoining areas. It is gotra centric panchayat covers a cluster of villages dominated by a particular gotra of Jats. All Khap members are supposedly linked through blood and a common genealogy leading to the evolution of many marital taboos and the ban on same village and same gotra marriages. Marriages within the neighboring villages belonging to other Khaps are also banned. Any marriage in violation of these rules is met with stringent punishments and barbaric edicts by the Khap panchayats like annulling the marriage, declaring the married couple as siblings and dissolving their marital tie, ostracizing the families and ordering killings, temporary or permanent ex-communication, corporeal punishment, religious expiation and forcing the girl to divorce her husband. Death executed by the caste panchayats is one of the worst articulations of violence. Usually, violence and death are considered preferable to condoning or accepting a mixed marriage.\
The sanction also include nominal or substantial fining, ritual expiation, public humiliation which means blackening the face or rubbing the nose in the dust before the aggrieved party or the entire gathering, touching other’s feet, shaving the head or drinking or dipping the nose in the urine of one or more persons, beating, giving feast to the cast members, out casting, expelling from the village or requiring the offender to repent by seeking forgiveness of the village elderly. Out casting being a serious punishment requires an inter-village panchayat of the caste members. Thus, the much disapproved inter-state marriages are usually resolved by the family members in a confidential way by forceful elimination of the couple or the girl. But, when the news spreads in the wider community, it is tackled by the community acting through the traditional caste panchayat wielding wide dictatorial power as extra-judicial authorities, with almost no legal knowledge and imposing justice according to its notions. Applying and enforcing repressive gender and caste codes, they attempt to operate as parallel legal systems in the country. The intervention of these traditional bodies has been at the cost of individual rights, more particularly woman’s rights.
In many cases, even if a family approves an inter-caste marriage or by itself arranges such marriage, the caste panchayats have objected to such marriages and have penalized the families by expelling them from the birabari or socially boycotting them. Biradari refers to not just one concrete structural unit at the village level but rather to patrilineal connection, real, putative or fictional and includes the agnates and cognates. It sometimes refers to the entire village, irrespective of the differences in caste, or creed. Observing the norms of the birabari is must for the izzat of the caste, group or village. Biradari uses caste panchayats for settling issues of marriage and sexual affairs amongst other matters. Each caste has its own biradari to enforce its rules but when the matter cannot be settled by the caste panchayat of a particular caste group due to few households of that caste in a village, it is usually referred to the dominant caste of the region which then assumes the power of enforcing the internal behavior of the endogamous group.
Once the decision is taken, its enforcement is the responsibility of the leaders of the village in which the penalized party lives. As per the recent diktat issued by the Khap Masha-panchayat, killings cannot be avoided in same gotra marriages since they are immoral in the Hindu society and should be banned and the guilty should be punished. Thus, the Indian social set up operates as the major catalyzing factor behind the increasing rate of the honor crimes committed against women in India.
CONCLUSION:
Violence against woman clubbed with the prohibitions on marital choice is a total negation of her rights. Since, the right to choose life partner at the time of marriage constitutes an integral part of her right of self-preservation, majority of the International Conventions, Declaration and Protocols fall in line by emphasizing that her consent and choice in the matters relating to marriage should be weighed and prohibit resultant violence against her due to the difference of opinion in these matters.
The maiden attempt specifically addressing the issue of honor crimes against women at the international level has been the adoption of Resolution 55/66 by the General Assembly explicitly identified the crimes based on the human rights issue and clearly voice the obligation of the State parties to exercise due diligence to prevent, investigate and punish the perpetrators of such crimes and provide protection to the victims. Again, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women emphasized the need to enact legislation for removing honor as a ground of defense in cases of assault or murder of a female family member. There exists a need to liberate and emancipate women from the shackles of ancient law, tradition and customs for better promotion and readjustment of their rights on the lines of equality, dignity and non-exploitation. It has to be borne in mind that there exists no honor in domestic violence, honor killings and crimes but only shame.
REFERENCES:
- Ahuja.R, (2006), Social Problems in India, Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
- Altekar.A.S, (1959), the Position of Women in Hindu Civilization: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.
- Omvedt.G, (1990), Violence against Women: New Movements and New Theories in India, New Delhi: Kali for Women.
- Liddle.J & Joshi.R, (1986), Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women & London: Zed Books.
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