7

BRAHMANICAL NATURE OF
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN1
Sharmila Rege

Let us review the different ways in which the issue of violence against women
has been addressed in the last 200 years in India. The basic questions that arise are
those pertaining to the forms of violence, the location of individuals and groups
addressing the issue and the specific contexts of their addressal. The missionaries,
the orientalists, colonial administrators, social reformers and the post-independent
Indian nation-state have all addressed the issue of violence against women as a
part of either their ‘civilising mission’, ‘revival or modernisation of Indian tradi-
tion’ or ‘women as weaker section’ projects. The Edwardian and Victorian femi-
nists addressed the issue as the white women’s burden while the first wave Indian
feminists lobbied for amendments in the Hindu law of property and marriage; for
‘status’ rather than ‘revival’.
All these discourses, in universalising the category of Indian women, often
encroached on the customary rights of the lower-caste women. Much of the
American and British, second wave, white feminist discourse on Third World
women carries the notion of Third World women as ‘always and already victims’.
The second wave feminists in India who formed autonomous women’s groups in
the 1970s, had broken away from the ‘larger/mass’ movements which overlooked
gender for the fear of dividing the movement. The autonomous women’s groups
politicised the issue of violence against women and attempted to build a sisterhood
in struggling against violence. The divisions by caste and religion that threaten
this sisterhood have become apparent in recent times. Steven Lukes’‘Radical View
of Power’2 and Harding’s ‘Epistemology of Rainbow Coalition Politics’3 provide
relevant theoretical frameworks for the analysis of violence and the strife in sis-
terhood. The violent practices against women reveal definite variations by caste;
while upper caste are subjected to controls and violence within the family, it is the
absence of such controls that makes lower-caste women vulnerable to rape, sexual
harassment and the threat of public violence. To varying degrees, these different
104 Sharmila Rege

practices are ‘accepted’ as given and some of them like ‘sati’ and ‘devdasi’ practice
may even be glorified. Lukes has argued that the supreme exercise of power is
through compliance, by control over the thoughts and desires of the other. The
collusion and contestation between patriarchies and ‘brahminism’ (upper-caste
practices and ideologies) reveals the exercise of such power through the differential
definitions and management of gender by caste. Gender was and is crucial to the
maintenance of reproduction of caste inequalities. Further, Lukes has argued that
power presupposes human agency and that agents consist in a set of expanding
and contracting opportunities. Together these constitute the structural possibilities
which specify the power of agents varying between time and over agents.4 Women’s
agency needs to be located in the context of the structural possibilities of class, race,
caste and community.The state has in all its programmes assumed the women to be
‘free agents’; outside the boundaries of caste, class and religion. The contradiction
between the state’s explicitly stated commitment to the annihilation of caste and
upgradation of women and the increasing violence against women and the lower
caste, is legitimised through the maintenance of caste and gender as separate issues
on the political agenda, precisely because of the important links between the two.
The ‘real interests’ of women must be conceptualised from the perspective of the
marginalised; in this case the perspectives of the Dalit women. Centring from the
perspective of the marginalised prevents the distortion of both; those at the centre
and at the margins.5 Further, such an analysis need not amount to speaking for the
marginalised or speaking for the ‘Dalit’ women for the multiple and contradictory
subject agent of feminism is also logically the subject of every other libratory pro-
ject. In following Harding, we agree that this is not only an epistemological but also
a moral and political issue.
The first major challenge to the women’s movement in India has come from the
state-sponsored programmes of modernisation. But in recent times, a major threat
is being posed by the Hindu fundamentalists who spread insidious propaganda
that not only ‘others’ the muslims but provides a utopia of ‘Ramrajya’ (rule of the
divine). To the educated unemployed and the educated upper-caste women con-
fined to the domestic sphere, the Hindu fundamentalists provide a public forum.
Women’s power as in the Hindu religious mythology is being posed as opposed
to the ‘western’ concept of women’s liberation. The IMF (International Monetary
Fund) guided liberalisation of the economy and the near acceptance of the Dunkel
draft by the Indian government as against alternative paths of development pose a
major threat to the women workers and peasants. In such a context, the left, the
anti-caste, ecology, tribal and women’s movement in India are realising the need
of interlinkages of ‘rainbow’ coalition politics. Social activist groups working in
diverse areas in different parts of India are coming together, attempting to work out
a political agenda.This chapter is part of such attempts; exploring the essential links
between caste and violence against women.The first section attempts to give a brief
summary of the issues that the contemporary women’s movement in India has to
confront. The second section traces the ways in which the debates and reform or
legislation against violence has in fact realigned patriarchal interest with changing
 Brahmanical violence against women 105

political formations.The third section presents cases of violence against upper-caste

women; the continuum ranging from everyday practices of verbal abuse to the
cases of widow burning, the cases of rape of lower-caste women which reveal the
links between ‘virtue’ and the right to protest against rape and the recent cases of
violence against lower-caste men; in which upper-caste women were reported to
have not only incited their menfolk into violence but also participate publicly in
the acts. In the last section, the impasse that the women’s movement faces and the
need to form coalitions, the important links between caste and gender that can help
from such coalitions are outlined.
Vast differences distinguish the lives of women in different parts of India and
within different caste, class, religious and ethnic groups. Eighty percent of India’s
population lives in the rural areas and more than 70% of India’s female labour force
falls in the category of landless agricultural labour. The struggle for these women
revolves around procuring food, fuel and water for their families. The number of
female-headed household have been on the increase and there has been a growing
deterioration and privatisation of the country’s common property resources on
which the poor in general and women in particular depend.6 Food allocation in
the family is heavily biased in favour of men and even in the agriculturally prosper-
ous state of Punjab, women’s average consumption of calories is only two-thirds of
that of men; despite the fact that women in this region perform at least 15hours of
arduous labour. This contributes to a higher mortality rate among women. For the
women of the rich peasant and upper castes, it is a struggle against seclusion and
torture within the family.7 In urban India, the female labour force is concentrated
in the informal section; mainly as domestic servants, construction labour and casual
labour. Only 10% of the female labour force is employed in industries. There has
been a visible improvement in the lives of the middle-class, upper-caste, educated
women, in terms of their participation on education and employment. Several stud-
ies have revealed that employment for women of these classes has not brought
much change in the power axes of the family.8Women’s labour in fact remains a
flexible resource.9 There is therefore, the paradoxical co-existence of constitutional
guarantees of equality and brutal expression of violence and the relative powerless-
ness of women. The population of women in India has been declining and the sex
ratio has declined from 972 females to 1,000 males in 1901 to 927 females to 1,000
males in 1991. Only 24.8% of the women are literate and only 5.7% can ever reach
the university. More than 70% of the female labour force is in the unorganised sec-
tion, which means long hours of work, wage differentials and no security. Birth of
daughters is unwelcome and new forms of female foeticide are emerging.The birth
of a daughter means the liability of guarding her virginity and debts in paying the
dowry in marriage to the bridegroom’s family. This payment, however, does not
guarantee any security for the women as there is always a demand for more in the
form of festive offerings and gifts. In the capital city of New Delhi, two women die
of burns every day; the cases being either of ‘suicide’ or dowry murders. In 1991,
the number of women who faced the torture of rape, were estimated at two mil-
lion, and the majority of the victims were tribal, Dalit; the incidence of rape being
106 Sharmila Rege

higher in areas declared to be turbulent and where the army or the police have
been stationed.10
The women’s movement in India has been in a lull after the declaration of
independence and the granting of constitutional guarantees of equality and free-
dom for all irrespective of caste, creed or sex. Disillusionment with the rhetoric
of socialist democracy and planned development set in, during the mid-1960s
and women began to participate in large number in the tribal, working class,
Dalit and student’s movements. The declaration of emergency and withdrawal of
civil rights in 1975 had led to several atrocities. As the emergency war lifted, civil
liberties groups brought to light several cases of gang rapes of lower-caste women
in northern India. Against such a background the autonomous women’s groups
emerged as the political force on the issue of violence against women. Nation-
wide networking of women’s groups emerged on the issue of rape and dowry
murders and the state was pushed into legal amendments.11 As feminist groups
in urban India began to focus on the violence outside and within the home, the
media projected them as ‘western’ and disrespectful of Indian tradition. The left
and the anti-caste movements labelled the feminist focus on violence as ‘middle
class’ and saw the women’s centres as being ‘welfaristic’ and not ‘revolutionary’
enough. All political parties were quick to catch on and revitalised or created a
women’s wing, taking care to draw on symbols of female power from popular
Hindu mythology.
The state-sponsored programmes of redistribution of land and modernisation
had begun in the 1960s, and by the 1980s, it was apparent that these had led to
increased inequalities in income and wealth. For the first 30years after Independ-
ence, women figured in the planned development as only ‘mothers’ in the ‘mother
and child welfare programmes’; despite the fact that more than 50% of the agricul-
tural labour was provided by women.12 The development projects such as the green
revolution project and the large dam projects have marginalised the poor and espe-
cially women. In the so-called prosperous green revolution region, the inequalities
in income have increased and the number of dowry deaths and malnutrition of
women have shown a steady increase.13 In the industrial sector, in the free trading
zones, women have been exploited as cheap labour and have been made to work
under conditions of strict supervision and physical abuse. Attempts at unionisation
have been brutally squashed with police assistance.14
The family planning programmes and population policies under the cover of
‘cafeteria’ approach have made political grounds of women’s wombs.15 International
organisations, such as IPPF (International Planned Parenthood Federation) and the
Population Council, have promoted the use of hormonal implants and injectibles
and the MNC’s who produce them, invoke the demands of the women’s move-
ment (control over body and fertility) as they market these drugs. Women’s groups
and health activists have opposed these on three grounds; side-effects, inadequate
public health services to meet the demands of such implants and the fact that these
drugs have not been standardised for women in India and that biochemical and
epidemiological studies are essential before their introduction in India. Women’s
 Brahmanical violence against women 107

right to choose and freedom are invoked while the politics of the private and health
care is sidetracked.16
For the majority of women in India, the uppermost problem is of survival. Pov-
erty, dowry murders, widow burning, female infanticide have assumed new forms
with modernisation and technological advancement.These contexts of fatal aggres-
sion seem to normalise the everyday practices of violence by the family, community,
state and global economy. This reality of oppression is being measured, codified, as
struggles are reduced to manipulable data to be filled into neat theoretical frame-
works. Baxi comments that women’s studies seem to be harnessed to producing a
third gender – men, women and PhDs in women studies.17 Deprivatisation of the
knowledge seems to be the first step in developing an approach towards violence
against women and collective political violence in India.18
To call the questions that were raised at the onset in the last 200 years, what
were the different forms of violence against women that have been addressed? Who
were the individuals or groups engaged in the public debates on the issue? And
most significantly, who is the ‘Indian Woman’ on whose behalf they plead? The
status of Indian women occupied a prominent position in the nineteenth-century
discourse. The need to reform Indian society was incorporated into the reform of
Indian woman’s position and Indian woman like Indian tradition was defined across
a particular axis of religion, class and caste.19 From the late eighteenth century, the
missionaries had begun to attack a range of ‘degenerate’ Hindu practices, majority
of which were directed expressly against women. The missionaries brought out a
volley of tracts and pamphlets directed at the British government and public, giv-
ing dramatic and empirical details of practices like widow burning and proclaiming
Indian men to be moral monsters. The aim was to contrast Hinduism to Christian-
ity, the location of women’s position at the centre of such a critique is seen as part
of an ongoing process of creating and projecting a superior national identity of
Britain – of which the English woman was a central motif, along with the English
art, rural life, literature and character.20
The appeals made by the missionaries led the colonial administration to inter-
vene through social legislation.This intervention was varied in the different regions
of India and reveals a complex interrelationship of contest and collusion between
indigenous patriarchal norms and those held by the British administration. This is
largely, but rarely noted visibly in the colonial regulation on agrarian relations.21
Several Western educated, Indian intellectuals, concerned, no doubt, with the plight
of Hindu women entered the arena of reform. These social reformers fall into two
categories: those who saw reform as a revival of the ‘Golden’ period of Hinduism
and those that sought the modernisation of ‘Indian’ tradition. The debates were all
based on the upper-caste religious texts and the forms of violence being addressed
(widow burning, child marriage, seclusion, enforced widowhood) were all primarily
upper-caste Hindu practices.The lower-caste women who were being marginalised
by the new land legislation and exposed to the threat of sexual violence under the
‘Zamindari’ system of land legislation and the distress sale of women following the
new land settlements in the eighteenth century are absent in these debates.22 The
108 Sharmila Rege

‘Indian woman’ in the reform debate was essentially Hindu, upper caste and sym-
bolic of the emergent middle class; women being tied to the very process of cultural
homogenisation of the middle class.23 Such a reform movement had very little
reach but served to provide a model of Indian womanhood. The position of the
Indian woman had occupied much of the early and the mid-nineteenth-­century
debates; towards the close of the century this issue disappears from the arena of
public debate. The overwhelming issues are directly political ones, concerning the
politics of nationalism.24 It has been argued that nationalism resolved the ‘woman’s
question’ in accordance with its preferred goals. This resolution was built around a
separation of the domain of culture into two spheres, the material and the spiritual
domain, the East was considered as superior and this was to be the spiritual essence
of the national culture.This distinction of the material/spiritual was condensed into
the ideologically superior dichotomy of inner/outer, home/world.25 This spiritual-
ity of the inner sanctum, the home was to be maintained by the woman as the torch
bearer of tradition (all violence within the family was thus rendered invisible), and
by reverse logic all those women (lower-caste working class) who ‘did not’ were
designated as ‘impure’.
British feminism had matured during the age of the empire but as Burton has
argued the British feminist participated in the assumptions of national and racial
superiority. She argues that Josephine Butler’s campaign on behalf of Indian women
is an example of imperial feminism. Her review of the feminist periodical literature
of the nineteenth century reveals that British feminism constructed the image of
the helpless Indian womanhood, on which their own emancipation in the impe-
rial nation state relied. Burton concludes that not only the Victorian and Edward-
ian feminists reproduce the moral discourse of imperialism but embedded Western
feminism deeply within it.26 Ramusack has referred to the British feminists as the
‘maternal imperialists’27 while Paxton argues that for the feminists the choice was
limited, between being racist and loyal or being disloyal to the civilisation.28 India
remained an imaginative landscape of the British feminists who addressed the issue
of violence against Indian women.
The first wave feminists in India (twentieth century) were women related to
the reformers or the nationalists, mainly upper-caste women who lobbied tirelessly
for the right to property and amendments in the Hindu law of marriage. These
first wave feminists were preoccupied with issues of ‘status’ rather than ‘survival’.
It was therefore, the upper-caste, middle-class women who drew the benefits from
the constitutional guarantees and legal measures.29 The second wave feminists in
India who formed autonomous groups politicised the issue of violence against
women, both inside and outside the home. Free legal aid centres and counselling
groups were set up and consciousness raising through street plays and posters on
the issue of violence became a regular practice in urban areas. As a result of several
such campaigns, the laws against Rape and Dowry Prohibition Act were amended.
The issue on Uniform Civil Code was taken up on a nationwide scale; however, the
ruling Congress Party fearing the loss of minority vote banks backtracked on the
issue. Those second wave feminists who did not accept autonomy and separatism
 Brahmanical violence against women 109

and had to remain in ‘mass’ movements argued that violence against women was no
doubt an important issue but the campaigns for legal amendments and crisis centres
were urban and middle class and that the economic issues were more urgent for
the masses of woman. The recent upsurge in caste and communal violence and the
participation of the women of the dominant groups in this violence points towards
the impasse facing the woman’s movement in India.30 In the next section cases of
violence are presented, before undertaking an analysis of the impasse.
For most of us the issue of widow burning or ‘sati’ was a historical issue, till we
saw a revival of the practice in 1987. The women’s movement later unearthed the
fact that after independence, there had been 38 cases of widow burning in India.
Historically, the custom has been prevalent only in certain regions of India and
among the upper castes and the landed. In regions where the widow had a right
in the deceased husband’s property, the practice became prevalent in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. The custom can be seen as the ultimate resolution of the
management and control over the widow’s sexuality. The anxiety over controlling
the widow’s sexuality was so high that in certain region the practice of ‘cold sati’
was devised for ensuring the commitment of ‘sati’ by the child widows. The child
widow would be poisoned in course of a festive celebration of her declaration to
become a ‘sati’ and then the cold body placed on a pyre of the husband. The lower
castes did not practice this custom and the lower-caste widows could remarry freely,
until the colonial intervention through the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856.31
The debate on widow burning began in the 1780s when the missionaries first
took up the issue.The colonial administration first intervened in the civil society on
the issue of ‘sati’. A debate ensued between the colonial officials and the Western-
educated Indian intellectuals on one hand and the conservatives on the other. The
entire debate is preoccupied with preserving true tradition.The widow is either the
victim or the heroine and both the parties intercede on her behalf to save her from
‘true tradition’. The reformers claimed that the high tradition to be followed while
the conservatives argued that true tradition demanded that for her own salvation
and that of her family a widow must commit ‘sati’. Mani had argued that in this
debate women are neither the subjects nor the objects but become the grounds for
debate.32
The revival of the practice in 1987 led to a nationwide controversy. There were
mainly tow positions taken; the liberals saw the practice as barbaric and a failure
of modernisation while the conservative pro-sati lobby defended the practice as
‘Indian’ tradition.What is important to note is that the region which saw the revival
of the practice, has never had a history of widow burning. Since 1954, the region
has seen the upper castes build 105 temples dedicated to the ‘satis’. The custom had
been systematically used to revive the identity of the upper castes (Rajputs) who had
faced a downfall after the state-sponsored land reform programme in which some
of the middle castes had benefitted and had consolidated their political position.
The protesting feminists came to be portrayed as a threat to the Hindu identity and
an all India association for the preservation of sati as a religious duty was formed.
The state fumbled, there was no moment for 11 days, as pressure from a progressive
110 Sharmila Rege

coalition built up on Sati Prohibition Act of 1829 was amended. The new act is
again an upholder of ‘true tradition’ as it declares that the custom is banned since
no religion in India endorses it. Moreover, the new Act treats the women as a free
agent, by making her act punishable,33 the upholders of the practice brought forth
the issue of the widow’s will and voluntary ‘sati’. Feminists argued that one can
hardly conceive of the widow’s will when widowhood imposes social death and
its own regime of misery for women. By raising the issue of women’s agency, in
the Indian context, one walks on a tight rope. If widow burning is at the extreme
end of the continuum of violent practices within upper-caste families, a critique of
the day-to-day life practices in the upper-caste homes would reveal the different
intermediate forms of control that operate. Firstly, there are linguistic clues; both
verbal abuse and the reinforcing of stereotypes. There are also severe controls over
women’s labour in that under the ideology of ‘grihalaxmi’ (the woman as the god-
dess of the household) the burden of domestic work is glorified and often women
begin to view this burden as their privilege. It must be noted here that the arduous
tasks of domestic work are performed by the lower-caste women who constitute
the majority of domestic labour. Attempts of unionisation by domestic workers
have been viewed negatively by their upper-caste women employers; strikes have
resulted in loss of jobs for most of these women.
In the upper-caste families, women are denied the right to work outside the
home and it has been observed that elevation in caste status is preceded by the
withdrawal of womenfolk from work outside the family. Among the urban middle
classes (upper caste), more flexibility seems to be operating than implied by the
categories of public and private. Women’s labour is used to meet the increasing
inflating but to ensure that this does not erode its own control, private patriarchal
authority brings into use ideology which on one hand highlights women’s total
commitment to the needs of the household and on the other consistently reiter-
ates taboos against sexuality or reproduction outside family and caste mores.34
There are then the controls exercised through actual physical abuse; wife beating,
enforced seclusion, denial of basic necessities are common methods of exercising
control, the elder women of the family, generally the mother-in-law being the
enforcing agent. The unmarried girls are closely guarded and any transgression of
norms results in their being withdrawn from public life; they are brought up to
believe that their husband’s extended family is their final destination and that their
parental home is only a transit lounge. That is, in all regional languages in India,
unmarried girls are reflected as property that does not belong to the family. The
post-independence Indian state has offered women equal facilities for education
and training but in no way has it questioned or bypassed the household’s authority
to decide whether or not women can avail of any of these facilities.35 The state in all
its programmes has maintained a ‘woman within the family approach’.The women
in India perform within the family any of the functions that have long been, at least
partially, the responsibility of the state; alternative ways of fulfilling these functions
would be extremely costly for the state. More importantly under modern ration­
alisations of ‘cultural legitimacy’ women have been kept within the family, rights
 Brahmanical violence against women 111

for women outside the family would pose a threat to the caste system and thereby
to the hegemony of the upper castes. The very fundamental rights and freedom
granted by the Indian Constitution to all citizens, the right against forced labour,
the freedom of movement, freedom of speech and expression, have been denied
to women by their families. Paradoxically, there is a strong tradition of according
forms of responsibility and veneration to women as ‘mothers’. Women can gain
access to power in the family only as agents of domination and oppression of the
younger women in the family.36
In case of lower-caste women the fact that their labour outside the family is
crucial for the survival of the family, leads to the lack of stringent controls on
their labour mobility and sexuality and this renders them ‘impure’ or ‘lacking in
virtue’. In several instances the rape of Dalit women may not be considered as rape
at all because of the customary access that the upper-caste men have had to Dalit
women’s sexuality. In almost all regional languages in India the word for ‘rape’ is
equivalent to the phrase ‘stealing the honour of ’ and since lower-caste women by
the virtue of their double oppression have no ‘honour’ to speak of the right to
redressal is often denied. In a recent incident at Birati in West Bengal, the police
argued that since the women ‘crying rape’ were prostitutes the matter could be
overlooked.37 The legal courts, too, operating along this ideology became apparent
in the two cases of rape; one of the lower-caste beggar woman (Laxmi) and the
other of a tribal landless labourer (Mathura). In both the cases, the courts acquitted
the rapists who were policemen. Question about the ‘virtue’ of these women were
raised and it had been argued that their character was questionable. These cases
were taken up by the women’s movement in India and the supreme court pushed
into reopening the cases and finally into amending the law against rape, to recognise
custodial rape and to put the onus of proof on the rapist and not the woman. Dalit
women suffer rape as a part of the ongoing caste confrontations. In rural India, defi-
ance of caste restrictions by the Dalits have most often resulted in arson and gang
rapes of women of the lower caste. If rape is at one end of the continuum of violent
practices against lower-caste women, there are the less obvious and also normalised
practices such as the successive marginalisation of the lower-caste performers and
the attempts to reform them and their creative expressions; thereby pushing the
majority of these artistes into hidden forms of prostitution.38 The percentage of
female headed households among the lower castes is as high as 70% to 75%; since
the incidence of desertion is very high and even in cases where the husband is
present, (often just his presence is seen as necessary by the women to ward off the
sexual threat of the men from their community), it is the women’s income that goes
towards the survival of the family since the husband’s income is spend on arrack or
bigamy being common; the income goes towards the maintenance of the ‘preferred’
wife. Lower-caste women in Andhra Pradesh have at the local level organised anti-
arrack movements, in a way that threatens the state; since most of the state revenue
comes from arrack. In Maharashtra, the ‘deserted’ women went on a march through
the state in an attempt to draw the state’s attention to the gravity of the problems
and the issue of maintenance.39 The situation of the Dalit women who are at the
112 Sharmila Rege

receiving end of both the upper-caste and lower-caste patriarchies, has been por-
trayed by Tersamma, a lower-caste activist in a poem:

We go to work for we are poor,

But the same silken beds mock us,
While we are ravished in broad daylight,
Ill-starred our horoscopes are,
Even our tottering husbands hiss and shout for revenge;
If we cannot stand their touch.
(Quoted by Dietrich, 1990)

In rural India, the participation of Dalit women in the different local struggles
for water, land or forests, has been on the increase.40 These struggles have to a
large extent regained from taking up the issue of violence against women. The
women’s movement, which addresses the issues of sexuality and violence, has been
limited to the urban centres. In recent times, there have been at least three widely
reported cases of violence against the lower caste (Chunduru in Andhra Pradesh,
Gothala and Pimpri Deshmukh in Maharashtra) in which the lower-caste men had
been hacked to death, because of their alleged indecent behaviour towards upper-
caste women. The upper-caste women in all the three cases had, it was reported,
not only incited their menfolk into the violent acts but also participated in them.
These cases present a problem for the feminist movement in that the alleged sexual
harassment of the upper-caste women by the lower-caste males could be ‘cover
up’ for caste confrontations;41 in that the agency of upper-caste women had been
invoked in caste confrontations (Professor Gopal Guru’s field reports support such
an argument).42 Even if one grants that the upper-caste women were being sexually
harassed by the lower-caste males, the issue has to be seen in the light of the years
of sexual abuse of the Dalit women by the upper-caste males and the customary
sanctions that legitimised such violence, the cases pointed to the urgent need of
coalitions between the women’s movement and the Dalit movement; such coali-
tions require a historical analysis of the links between caste and gender, the next
section attempts to contribute to such analysis.
A caste-wise analysis of the violent practices against women would reveal that
the incidence of dowry murders, controls on mobility and sexuality by the family,
widow burning are more frequent among the upper castes while Dalit women are
more likely to face the collective threat of rape, sexual harassment and physical vio-
lence.43 This has implications for the sociological analysis of caste; volumes of which
have overlooked the essential links between caste and gender, thereby rendering a
partial understanding of the caste system. Castes and patriarchies have been main-
tained and reproduced through the ‘textually mediated practices’44 of sociology.
Sociologists, (under the influence of structure-functionalism), with varying
emphasis, delineated the following characteristics of the caste system in India:

1 Each linguistic division in India shows a wide variation of caste, about 200
groups with distinct names, birth in one of which determines the status of an
 Brahmanical violence against women 113

individual in society. These groups are further divided into sub-castes, which
fix the limits for marriage and effective social life. Each caste had its own gov-
erning body, the ‘caste and panchayat’; to this day several of the interfamilial
and intrafamilial grievances are referred to these bodies.45
2 The caste system operates on a principle of hierarchy and difference.46 There is
a scheme of social precedence amongst the castes, though this varies with the
regions, in most cases it is the ‘brahmins’ who are at the top of the ritual scale
and the ‘untouchable’ or the ‘scavenger’ castes at the bottom. Elevation in eco-
nomic and political status for a caste can lead to a collective change in its posi-
tion within the caste hierarchy. (Such changes, as mentioned earlier, have been
accompanied by withdrawal of women from work outside the household.)
3 The caste system outlined the religious and civil disabilities and privileges of
the different castes, these ranged from the denial of use of public resources
like wells, roads, temples, the denial to use certain kinds of clothing, hous-
ing and differential punishments by caste and definite restrictions on feeding
and social intercourse.47 (Such privileges of the upper castes also included the
sexual rights of upper-caste men over lower-caste men.) Though the Indian
law marks discrimination by caste and practice of untouchability a crime, such
practices continue, especially in rural India.
4 The caste system restricted the choice of occupation; in a land-based econ-
omy, the callings were based on heredity. This factor has undergone consider-
able change and there is no one-to-one correspondence between castes and
occupations.
5 The essence of caste system according to most sociologists is the practice of
endogamy or marriage within the sub-caste. Though there are exceptions to
this rule in that some castes practiced hypergamy, wherein to give ones daugh-
ter in marriage to a man of higher caste was a preferred form of marriage;
the reverse, the marriage of a lower-caste man with a woman of higher caste,
was severely punished. (What sociologists have concealed under the rubrics
of endogamy is the fact that women were and are the ‘gateways’ to the caste
system.)48

The principles of caste and the rule of conduct for the different castes were codi-
fied in the ‘shastras’ or the instructional treatises of the Hindus which date back to
the third century BCE These were written by the ‘Brahmins’ or the priestly castes
who legitimised the rule of the ‘kshatriya’ caste or the warrior castes. These rules
were popularised through the ‘Puranas’ or mythological stories. In these treatises
women have been equated to the lower castes and definite restrictions have been
placed on both. Both have been defined as impure, of sinful birth and as having
a polluting presence. Both the lower castes and women had to observe practices
of verbal difference, temporal distance and dress codes as an index of their subor-
dinate status.49 Around 800 BC these treatises begin to make a definite division
between the upper-caste women and those of the lower castes. In the ‘Manusm-
riti’, the most influential treatise, the realignment of castes and patriarchies is
apparent in the ‘ideology of the pativrata (one who worships the husband and his
114 Sharmila Rege

kin without any grievances)’. Becoming a ‘pativrata’ was posed as an alternative

for upper-caste women to rise above their sinful birth and an access to salvation.
It was posited that an upper-caste woman must always be under the control of her
father, husband or son.50 This ideology secured the compliance of the upper-caste
women and rendered them ‘pure’ as against the lower-caste women. While strict
control over the sexuality and labour of upper-caste women came to be legiti-
mised; the social and sexual labour of the lower-caste women was made available
to the patrilineal land economy. Paradoxically, the very ‘failure’ of the lower-caste
men to control the sexuality of their women was projected as a major root of
their impurity. In a patrilineal society, the caste determined not only the right to
property but also the right to occupation. The upper two sections, the ‘brahmins’
and ‘kshatriyas’, were not related directly to the land, and monopoly was devel-
oped through clear cut ideas of purity and pollution. These ideas were linked to
heredity and it became essential to prove that the women of the upper castes could
not have sexual relations outside of their caste. However, there were no physical
characteristic that could prove caste purity and the women of the upper castes in
their daily routine did come in contact with the males of the potter, bangle seller
and other artisan and lower castes. Hence severe restriction came to be placed on
women and ‘chastity’ of women assumed unwarranted importance. This argument
is further strengthened by the fact that the severe controls in the form of pre-
puberty marriages and widow burning became most pronounced in those periods
when ‘brahminism’ faced a threat whether from Buddhism or the ‘Bhakti’ and
‘tantra’ movements. Feminist writings on caste have argued that gender ideology
that was constructed in these texts not only legitimised the structures of patriar-
chy but also the very organisation of caste.51 Vaid and Sangari have argued that the
lives of women exist at their interface of caste and class inequalities and that the
description and management of female sexuality is crucial to the reproduction of
these inequalities.52 The counterfactual to this argument may be seen in the chal-
lenges posed by the ‘tantric’ and ‘bhakti’ movement.The ‘tantric’ movement is seen
in the form of different cults based on the folkways and worship of the mother
goddesses. These cults focused on the release and celebration of sexual energies
as against controls over sexuality. The ritual practices of these cults involved the
sexual intermingling of castes.These cults were brutally curbed or in some regions
their revolutionary potential lost by their integration into mainstream Hinduism.
The ‘bhakti’ movement on the other hand was a movement led by the poet saints
who stressed the direct relationship of human beings, men and women alike, to
god; thereby challenging the hegemony of the upper castes, mainly the ‘brahmins’
in their self-proclaimed role of mediators between the divine and the human.
However, this movement did not directly address this issue of sexuality and there-
fore of the caste-based division of labour and this perhaps, partly explains, the
relatively tolerant attitude of the ‘brahmins’ towards this movement. The medi-
eval ages have been labelled as the ‘dark ages’ by the colonial historians and their
‘brahmin’ colluders; we suspect that the stories of the dark ages could well be the
stories of rebellion.
 Brahmanical violence against women 115

To conclude, the issue of violence against women, cannot be seen as either a

‘caste’ issue or a ‘gender’ issue, but that it must be located in the links between the
two. In a political system where dominant factions lobby, organise and mobilise
along caste alliances of the rich and middle peasantry; effective action requires
coalitions between the ‘Dalit’ and women’s movements. In fact, delineating the ‘real
interest’ of women requires the analysis of the complex interlinkages of gender and
other structural inequalities or else the demands of the women’s movement could
well lead to the consolidation of some of these inequalities.

Notes
1 This chapter has appeared as ‘Caste and Gender: The Violence against Women in India’,
Chapter 3, in P. G. Jogdand (ed.), Dalit Women in India: Issues and Perspectives, forwarded
by U. B. Bhoite, New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House in collaboration with University of
Poona, Pune, 2013, pp. 18–36. Used with permission.
2 S. Lukes, Power: A Radical View, London: MacMillan, 1974.
3 S. Harding, ‘Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epistemology from/for Rain-
bow Coalition Politics’, Development and Change, Vol. 23, No. 3, Sage, 1992: 175–193.
4 Lukes, Power.
5 Harding, ‘Subjectivity, Experience and Knowledge: An Epistemology from/for Rainbow
Coalition Politics’, 1992.
6 B. Agarwal (ed.), Structures of Patriarchy: State, Community and Household in Modernising
Asia, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1988.
7 M. Kishwar and R.Vanita, In Search of Answers, New Delhi: Horizon India Books, 1991.
8 Guy Standing, ‘The Road to Workfare: Alternative to welfare or Threat to Occupation?’,
International Labour Review, Vol. 129, No. 6, 1990: 677–692.
9 N. Banerjee, Patriarchy and Work, Shimla: IIAS, 1992.
10 N. Gandhi and N. Shah, Issues at Stake, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1992.
11 Ibid.
12 Towards Equality, Report of the Committee on Status of Women in India, Ministry of
India Publication, New Delhi, 1975.
13 B. Agarwal, ‘Women, Poverty and Agricultural Growth in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies,
Vol.13 No.4, July 1986.
14 S. Trikha, A Study of Women’s Employment in Kandla Free Trade Zone, Mimeo, New Delhi:
ICRIER, 1985.
15 Something Like a War, 1992.
16 S. Tharu and T. Niranjana, Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender, Investigating
Hyderabad, 1992. Chapter 2 in this edition.
17 Upendra Baxi, ‘From Human rights to the Right to Being Human’, in Upendra Baxi,
Geeti Sen and Jeanette Fernandes (eds.), The Right to Be Human, New Delhi: India Inter-
national Centre, 1987.
18 Ibid.
19 E. Wolf, Re-inventing Tradition, Shimla: IIAS, 1992.
20 Ibid.
21 Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New
Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990.
22 Ibid.
23 S. Banerjee, ‘Marginalisation of Women’s Popular Cultural in Nineteen Century Bengal’,
in S.Vaid and K. Sangari (eds.), Recasting Women, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990.
24 P. Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Woman’s Question’, in Vaid and Sangari
(eds.), Recasting Women.
25 Ibid.
116 Sharmila Rege

26 A. Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol.13 No.
4, 1990.
27 B. Ramusack, ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies’, Women’s
Studies International Forum, Vol.13 No.4, 1990.
28 N. Parton, ‘Feminism Under the Raj’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol.13 No.4,
1990.
29 G. Omvedt, Theories of Violence, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1991, 1985.
30 Tharu and Niranjana, Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender. Chapter 2 in this
edition.
31 P. Choudhary, ‘Customs in a Peasant Society’, in Vaid and Sangari (eds.), Recasting Women,
1990.
32 L. Mani, ‘Multiple Meditations’, Inscriptions No.5, University of California, 1989.
33 Vasudha Dhagamwar, Towards the Uniform Civil Code. Bombay: N. M. Tripathi Private
Ltd., under the auspices of the Indian Law Institute, New Delhi, 1988.
34 Banerjee, Patriarchy and Work.
35 Ibid.
36 Kishwar and Vanita, In Search of Answers, 1991.
37 T. Sarkar, ‘Reflections on the Birati Rape Cases’, Economic and Political Weekly, Febru-
ary 2, 1991.
38 S. Rege, Sati: A Critical Analysis, Monograph: WSC, Department of Sociology, University
of Poona, 1989.
39 Samata Andolan, 1990. For details, see https://www.samtaandolan.co.in/.
40 G. Omvedt, Theories of Violence, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1990.
41 V. Bhagwat and S. Rege, ‘Towards a Gender-Sensitive Sociology’, paper presented at the
UGC National Seminar, March 1993.
42 G. Guru, ‘Dalit Killings in Marathwada’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVI No. 51,
December 21, 1991.
43 G. Dietrich, ‘The Relationship Between Dalit Movements and Women’s Movement:
Cases and Conceptual Analysis’, paper for the IAWS, Calcutta, 1990.
44 Dorothy E. Smith, Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling, London:
Routledge, 1990.
45 G. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, Bombay: Allied, 1956.
46 D. Gupta, Social Stratification, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
47 Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, 1956.
48 Ira Das, ‘Sati: A Heinous System of Women Oppression’, Shodhak, Vol. 17, Part A, Sr. No.
49, 1988.
49 R. Guha, Elementary Forums of Peasant Insurgency in India, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1983.
50 P.V. Kane, History of Dharmashastra:Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil law in India,Vol. 1,
Part. 2, Government Oriental Series, Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute,
1930, reprinted in 1974.
51 Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Patriarchy in Early India: Gender Caste, Class
and State’, Economical and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 14, Special Articles, April 3,
1993:579–585; J. Liddle and R. Joshi, Daughters of Independence, New Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1986;Vasanth Kannibaran and Kalpana Kannibaran, ‘Caste and Gender: Under-
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52 Vaid and Sangari, Recasting Women.