Creating the Rape Capital of the World: part 1, a history
In 2011, I spent six months in Hyderabad, India, steeping in the culture of my parents. To say I enjoyed every second would be a lie — but to say I regretted any second would be just as untruthful. My love for India lay dormant beneath my skin for years, masking itself as ambivalence and only revealing its true, obsessive self months after the fact, in painful retrospect. When a plume of car exhaust fills my nose in New York City; when the rev of a motorcycle’s engine rips through my small, suburban town; or when turmeric from my mother’s cooking stains my fingernails, I can close my eyes and find myself back in the belly of the bazaar. More than the tastes or smells or sounds of India, I miss the freedom. I miss leaning out the side of an auto rickshaw and feeling the sting of monsoon winds on my face. I miss watching my feet dangle off the edge of our apartment building’s roof — no railings to hold you back, no one to catch you, no rules. I miss downing mysterious bottles of family secrets when I felt under the weather and embracing an eat-first-ask-questions-later mantra with street food. I miss drowning in a wave of calm each time I would realize that everyone in the room looked like me — the liberating, selfish satisfaction in naturally conforming, almost to the point of banality.
This is the India that nine-year-old Rida internalized: beautiful, inclusive, and free. But this has never been and will never be India’s truth. As grateful as I am to be able to paint such a rosy picture of my homeland, I do so from a place of privilege — from the sheltered, blissfully ignorant eyes of a child.
India does not liberate — it suffocates. And no one better understands the oppression ingrained in Indian culture than its own women.
My family and I returned home from India in January of 2012, at the start of the new year. By December of that same year, India was a very different country, standing at a precipice of a massive cultural revolution spurred on by one woman: Jyoti Singh. The details of her gang rape are brutal and unnerving and downright painful to voice, but a hesitancy to speak about rape is the very reason India has been dubbed the ‘rape capital of the world.’ It’s why her rapists thought they could get away with what they did. It’s why it took this long for the Indian public to acknowledge the prevalence of rape in their own backyard. And it’s why her story deserves to be told — in its unadulterated, uncensored, and uncomfortable entirety.
On the night of December 16th, 2012, Jyoti and a friend, Awindra Pandey, got together to watch the movie Life of Pi in theaters. The movie wrapped up around 9:30 pm, at which point they boarded a private bus that they believed would take them home. The door closed; the lights shut off; and the six male occupants of the bus, driver included, turned their attention to Jyoti and her friend. When Awindra noticed the bus deviate from its usual route, he voiced his concerns to the driver — only to be met with taunts from the six other men. In the ensuing fight, the men gagged Awindra, beat him unconscious with an iron rod, dragged Jyoti to the back of the bus, and proceeded to take turns beating her, raping her, biting her, and using the iron rod to savagely penetrate her. In an interview months later, one of her rapists recalled pulling something akin to a rope out of her body and tossing it aside. Doctors confirmed that these were her intestines.
At 11 pm that night, a passerby found Jyoti and Awindra on the side of the road, presumed dead before being stripped of their clothes and thrown out of the moving bus. They were taken to Safdarjung Hospital, where Jyoti received emergency medical treatment for massive damage to her genitals, uterus and intestines. She clung to life for thirteen days, pushing through multi-organ failure and intense fever to not only condemn but identify each of her attackers. “They are animal-like people,” she said. “They should be burned alive.”
When news broke of what had happened to Jyoti, Indian law prevented the spread of her name without familial consent, so the public chose a name befitting of her bravery: Nirbhaya, a Sanskrit word meaning The Fearless One. In truth, Jyoti wasn’t dubbed Nirbhaya simply because she fought back during her rape, leaving bite marks all over her attackers — rather, what truly awed the public was her refusal to remain quiet in its aftermath. Jyoti was the antithesis of the silent, subordinate, model Indian girl. She was a medical student, paving her way in a traditionally male-dominated field. She hailed from an impoverished background, yet refused to consider marriage her sole option for social mobility — she was going to be her own hero. She had platonic male friends, a concept even my Americanized father can barely fathom. And, most importantly, she knew her rape was solely her rapists’ fault. As cut-and-dry as her case seems, those who sympathized with her rapists sowed seeds of doubt in her credibility every chance they got.
Why was she out so late in the first place? What was she wearing? Why was she spending time with a boy? Did she provoke the men? Was she a virgin? Did she pray often enough, like a good Hindu girl? Or did she simply get what she deserved?
Her parents could have easily followed the path laid out for them by years of Indian misogyny: blame the victim. They were given every reason to feel shame for what had happened to their daughter, every reason to mourn her death privately and quickly — but they refused. Her parents, Badri Nath Singh and Asha Devi, screamed her name from every rooftop, giving hundreds of millions of Indian residents an intimate look into their grief and pain. Jyoti was their only child, but she was no longer their child alone. From that year onwards, Jyoti was India’s daughter. Though 23-year-old Jyoti did not live long enough to see the nationwide outcry her bravery had sparked, her name is permanently stitched into the delicate silks of Indian history — a scarlet letter A embroidered on the chest of every Indian citizen.
The graph above depicts a sharp spike in the number of reported cases of rape following 2012, more than doubling from 2012–2013. With an estimated 99.1% of rapes in India going unreported, what can be reasonably inferred is that the volume of rapists in India did not suddenly increase in 2012; rather, there is an undeniable correlation between media coverage of Jyoti’s rape and women’s willingness to report their own rapes, begging the question, What was so different about Jyoti’s case? Some believe it was the sheer brutality of her rape that jolted India awake. Some viewed the protests as inevitable — India was a tea kettle a single degree below its boiling point, and Jyoti was merely the martyr needed to turn liquid into scalding steam. Though both theories are equally valid, the underlying reason Jyoti served as the lynchpin for a new wave of feminism in India was because her very existence as a self-made, independent woman threatened the stability of centuries-old Indian patriarchy.
To trace the cracks Jyoti exposed in the foundation of Indian society, it is crucial that we look back in history, to the first bricks laid. In 1500s BCE, the ancient Indus Valley Civilization falls to Aryan conquest, and the Aryans move into the Indian subcontinent. They follow the polytheistic Vedic religion, a fundamental precursor to a religion now followed by close to 80% of India’s population: Hinduism.
During this time, Sanskrit texts known as the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita are written to detail exactly how one should live their life. At the dawn of the later Vedic period, people begin to challenge traditional Vedic order, and the Upanishads are written to promote staying in one’s caste, an Aryan class structure determined by birth. At the top of the pyramid are brahmins: the intellectual and spiritual leaders. Beneath them are kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers, and then vaishyas, the merchants and farmers. Further down the pyramid are shudras, the workers meant to serve the upper classes, and then at the very bottom are dalits, the ‘untouchables’ tasked with the work society needs but refuses to do: butchery, grave-digging, and the like.
Chandragupta Maurya rises to power in the 300s BCE and establishes the Maurya Empire. The Vedic religion also continues to evolve, placing more and more emphasis on the caste system. “Whoever upholds his own duty [and] the rules of caste and divisions of religious life will surely be happy both here and hereafter,” reads the Arthashastra, a text written by Chandragupta’s chief advisor that effectively serves as the Mauryans’ legal code.
Though discrimination on the basis of caste is constitutionally abolished in 1950, generations of revulsion towards dalits — and a karmic burden to accept one’s place in this life — renders it impossible to reverse discrimination in rural India. According to the Human Rights Watch, “Dalits endure near complete social ostracization….they may not use the same wells, visit the same temples, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls.” Government resources are often allocated towards villages with more secure infrastructure, leaving impoverished dalit communities to fend for themselves.
How does the caste system propagate the oppression of Indian women? Well, when a woman is married off in India, it is tradition for the bride’s family to pay dowry to the groom’s family; but as a member of a lower caste, this can become very costly the more financially stable and educated the prospective groom is. Thus, lower castes have two options when the much-anticipated baby turns out to be a girl: inevitably pay a low dowry and marry her off to a man less capable of providing for her, or commit female infanticide. With the latter option posing less of a financial burden, its practice is all-too-common in rural India, resulting in a biological ratio skewed towards men and 63 million statistically ‘missing’ women.
Alongside justifying restrictions on social mobility, religion was historically used to diminish the importance of an Indian woman’s life. In the 3rd century CE, the Gupta Empire seizes control of India, and it is during this time that the practice of sati, in which widows commit suicide by jumping into their husbands’ funeral pyres, grows in prominence. Women who commit sati are not only thought to be chaste and honorable but are also promised karmical gains from their sacrifice. Knowing women are religiously forbidden from obtaining moksha — the Hindu equivalent of nirvana — sati often poses itself as the closest a woman can come to religious piety at this time.
The arrival of Muslims into the Indian subcontinent leads to the rise of the Delhi Sultanate and the subsequent Mughal Empire, establishing roots for some of the near 13% of India’s population today that is Muslim. Though patriarchal religious leaders continue to promote misogynistic practices, women are now considered equal under God, and we see the first attempts from an Indian government to legally ban sati. Unfortunately, this progress is short-lived, as the British take control of India in 1858.
Tasked with governing several fundamentally different religious groups — Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and more —the British Raj in India allows Muslims to follow sharia law and sets about creating a legal code for non-Muslims based on the Laws of Manu, a set of personal guidelines that the British erroneously believe to be a legal code used by previous dynasties. “In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, and when her lord is dead to her sons,” Manu writes, making clear his belief that “a woman must never be independent.” From this point forward, women are not only religiously but legally deemed men’s property; thus, it is unsurprising that today, India is one of 36 countries in the world that do not consider marital rape a crime when the wife is above age 15.
As Great Britain tightens its grip around India, Mohandas Gandhi’s reputation as a peaceful dissenter grows and he is credited with greatly expanding the participation of women in nationalist politics. Though he is certainly not a feminist and perpetuates female domesticity by encouraging women to boycott British products and make them at home instead, he does earn women respect in the grander scheme of patriotism and resistance. As a result, the 1950s-60s represent a period in which elite women reap the rewards of independence; in fact, women are elected to state legislature, and Indira Gandhi becomes the first female Indian Prime Minister in 1966.
From the 1970s to modern day, more and more women speak out against oppression and enter the workforce, but these women face aggressive male resistance that often manifests in the form of rape. Moreover, as upper class women’s status improves, lower class women‘s economic disadvantage places them at an even higher risk of sexual assault. Part 2 of this series will explore the effects of generational wealth inequality on Indian rape culture, specifically among the highly-targeted dalit community.
Turning back the clock on Indian history reveals the gradual indoctrination of discrimination into Indian society — be it on the basis of caste, gender, or religion — and sets the stage for the modern day perpetuators of rape culture: socioeconomic status, police corruption, religious tensions, ulterior political motives, and so many more. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, continually refers to India as a “youthful nation,” but there is nothing youthful about a country that willfully stalls feminists’ progress in favor of archaic, patriarchal legislation. And though Jyoti Singh was the epitome of the modern Indian woman, the atrocity she suffered was anything but new.
Rape is an Indian institution as old as time.
