Características del transporte interprovincial de pasajeros

Two broad distinctions in the definition of the status of women can be made: status derived from autonomy, power, and control over resources and status derived from prestige, respect, and honour (Ahmed-Ghosh, 1995). In India, the former construct is the privilege of a small minority of women. The latter is highly valued, as it is in the conduct, actions, and social performance of the women that the family invests theirIzzat (honour and prestige). In a caste-ridden and closed community of extended households, the prestige of the group and the family is considered paramount. Hence, this safeguarding of familyIzzat can be interpreted as a method of social control over women’s behaviour. A family’s Izzat must be preserved at all costs to the extent that family interests take precedence over individual interests (Ahmed-Ghosh, 1995). Consent to patriarchal norms, caste, religion, and class is glorified and is reflected in the manner in which the woman is perceived by her marital family. But Sangari (1999) warned that “careful analytical distinctions need to be made between consent resting on material arrangements which guarantee women rights, compensation, or protection and consent resting on forms of coercion which push women towards normative behaviour” (373). Indeed, it is this latter distinction that underlies the vulnerability that renders women susceptible to abuse, servility, and voicelessness.

lives and actions affect it the most and yet a woman’sIzzat is not her own but belongs to her father, her husband or is a reflection of the family in totality. Preserving a woman’s

Izzat and through it the family’s Izzat often becomes the greatest responsibility of a woman’s guardians. Izzat is a very broad concept encompassing caste and class status, public reputation and it covers related issues of shyness (Lihaz), shame (Sharam) (Kandiyoti, 1991). A woman’s awareness of her own body and theSharam related to it is also an awareness of the social body. Sharam is a concept associated with physical modesty and is a means of maintaining social distance from men, other caste and class. It is also a tool for maintaining social distance between men and women, between what is public and private and between one social group and another. Sharam and the related

Lihazare vital to maintaining theIzzatof a woman (Thomson, 1981). In certain villages a woman’sIzzat can be damaged even if she is seen talking to certain men. It is necessary for the woman to not be a subject of public criticism. She may be referred to asBesharam

which means a woman without shame. This would mean that the men in the family would lose theirIzzat. Das (1976) has argued that women are the gateways to caste and family membership. Men are not similarly placed. Hence if women are not protected the boundaries between caste and clan start becoming blurred. The idea of Izzat is thus a collective concept. It reaches out beyond the individual to the immediate family, the larger extended family, the clan, the caste and the social caste. ThusIzzat is a means to control a woman’s sexuality and any transgression by women including the wives and the daughters of the family would be an imputation that patriarchal control has not been exercised (Yuwal Davis, 1992:78).

7. Conclusion

The women’s movement’s strategic engagement with the Indian state in tackling what might be described as the post-colonial element of the State has opened up a space for public debates on VAW and women’ rights (Sunder Rajan, 2003).Women and civil liberties groups have campaigned to stop excesses, to reduce state power and to increase the space for civil society. It has repeatedly campaigned against the abuse of power by the state officials and gender violence even when it is state generated. Yet, the other element of the state is a product of its nationalist past, which established a constitutionally secular state committed to equality for all its citizens and in particular for women. This aspect of the state seems to carve out a place for women in a civil society. This space is transient and protean and at constant risk of disintegration from threats of religious fundamentalism and communalism. The women’s movement steers this space despite these limitations, campaigning against state induced gender violence, and seeking greater rights for women.

Women continue to face another constructed dichotomy between tradition and modernity. The women’s movement, particularly through its legal and social engagement with women’s rights, is associated with the urban middle class and is thus seen as tied to a secular, modern, Westernised desire to create a pan-Indian identity (Asad, 2003). While

there are diasporic sprouts of women’s groups and activism in the rural areas, the urban elite and middle class have managed to dominate the discourse of women’s rights even as the movement is criticised for speaking with an urban elitist bias sometimes.

This chapter had the objectives of grounding the thesis in its historical background and drawing the history of the constructions of WUR within the nationalist and the post colonial movement. It also had the objective of explaining the reasons for the uneasy relationship that the women’s movement has had with the police in order to understand the marginalisation of the police from the implementation of DVA to be investigated in Chapters Four and Six. The final objective of this chapter was to trace the reasons for the active involvement of the civil society in drafting the DVA.

This chapter has argued that the ways in which women’s identities have been constructed parallel to the development of the women’s movement and its positioning in relation to national political have influenced the constructions of WUR. It has shown how the movement has focused on VAW even as there was a simultaneous cultural and historical development of the binary divisions of women as good and bad. Thus the prototypes of the early imaginations of WUR find their stock in ‘bad women’. The ‘love hate’ relationship between the movement and state has been explored. It has investigated the origins of the awkward relationship that the women’s movement has had with the police which will be explored in more detail in Chapters Four and Six in relation to the way in

which the DVA was drafted to minimise the role of the police and the gradual taking over of the space by the civil society in the implementation of the DVA. The ghar-bahir

argument continues to the present day even as the WUR rupture the boundaries between them as it is argued in Chapter Five. Thirdly it has provided aids for understanding why the DVA was drafted by a women’s group and the political struggles that preceded the passing of the Act as law by the Houses of parliament. It has traced the active involvement of the civil society in campaigning for women’s rights and the various ways in which the problems of VAW has been addressed in the country. It has investigated the complex history of the battles for space and voice that the groups have had to fight against the state for the equal treatment as citizens for its women and the positions of WUR within these spaces. The next chapter analyses the secondary sources in the form of existing scholarships on VAW illuminated by WUR. It also develops the research design and explains the methodology adopted by this research.

Chapter Two

WUR as Constructions of Post-colonial Women in India

1. Introduction

The law often works on the presumption of the ideal legal subject (Smart, 1992; Lacey, 1998; Naffine, 2003). This legal subject is rational, capable of ‘sticking to her story’ and if the subject is gendered, she ‘fits the bill’ of certain pre-conceived constructions of Indian womanhood. Thus when women turn to the law in times of violence, they become legal subjects located within multiple subjectivities (Moore, 1994; Merry, 2006). The ‘post structuralist gendered subject’ takes up multiple subjectivities ‘within a range of discourses and social practices’ and these subjectivities are held together ‘by experiences of identity, the physical grounding of the subject in the body and the historical continuity of the subject’ (Moore, 1994: 141). This chapter argues that a WUR approaching the law in times of violence is breaking the historical continuity of the ideal legal subject. Her gendered position is a complex subset of socio-cultural and legal positioning. The thesis investigates the subject positions that WUR take up when they are faced with the DV framework in Delhi and in Mumbai. Just as Moore’s (1994: 141) gendered subject is not ‘singular, fixed or coherent’, WUR bring a change in the historically fluid concept of the ideal female legal subject. WUR do not have the support of family or kinships as they are

transgressors of familial values and honour (Izzat). This will either have the positive effect of WUR adapting to the new subject position because of the absence of familial ties or it will negatively influence the shift in subjectivity as they feel reluctant to invoke the law even as their families have abandoned them their new subject position in law that of autonomous person rather than defined through the abusive relationship. In this chapter we examine the extent to which WUR as transgressors rid themselves of the status of victimhood through their exercise of legal agency. It explores the extent to which this new subject position in law of WUR is that of an autonomous person rather than defined through the violent and transgressive relationship.

This chapter argues firstly that the various constructions of post-colonial women in India contribute to the WUR legal subjectivity. The second argument is that WUR women manage to ‘rupture or transgress’ the heterosexual/familial matrix and their status falls ‘outside the heterosexual institutions of family and marriage’ (Menon, 2007:15). WUR thus free up a space for themselves outside such ideological strongholds by experiences of knowledge of themselves as being sexual beings (Franco, Macwan and Ramnathan, 2007: 161). In this way the women who are relegated to the margins of society because of the societal preoccupation with women’s appropriate sexual conduct find themselves in the centre of political and legal discourse by making the transition from a victim of violence to a legal subject claiming her rights as a wronged citizen.

This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section argues that the broader literature on VAW contributes only marginally to an understanding of the position of WUR. Legal feminist perspectives on the constructions of female sexual identity, the bifurcation of social life into private and public spheres assist with an understanding of the influence of such a transgression by WUR in terms of private sexuality and public complaint. Developing the theme from Chapter One that Indian identity is heavily bound up with understandings of female sexual normative transgression and with women’s position in public sphere. It thus argues that the private transgression of WUR translates into a public identity. The second section situates WUR within post-colonial feminist debates while the third section argues that feminist methodology and research methods best address the study’s research question which involves the capture of WUR identities and legal subject positions.