The Ethics of Self-Making in Postcolonial India (original) (raw)

On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domains. On the days following her death, angry mobs and teargassing police clashed at India Gate in New Delhi. Multiple social imaginaries around gender, public sphere, state-responsibility and civicness collided. Some defended the victim as their mother or sister, who could potentially have been in that same situation. Others disagreed fervently, and invoked the modern female citizen, whose rights to dignity, safety and security mandated defense without recasting her as the fragile beneficiary of patriarchal protection. The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, analyzed the situation as telling of crucial Indian cultural divide-'Such crimes hardly take place in 'Bharat', but they occur frequently in 'India' (Times of India 2013). The India-Bharat divide was refashioned in this moment, as the product of conflict between the postliberalization onslaught of transnational capital flows and the resilience of 'traditional' communitarian social structures. Moreover, a vast, cacophonous, polarized democratic field revealed itself in the aftermath of the December 16 rape. A variegated collective, comprising feminists, college-student liberals, right-wing patriarchs, and cynics, inhabited this cacophonous stage and its virtual counterpart. Just as the stage for 19 th century social reform came to pivot itself around the figure of the sati (Mani 1998), a number of political selves crystallized earlier this year around competing representations of the rape victim who was described by the media as Nirbhaya ('fearless one'), Damini ('lightning'), Amaanat ('treasured possession'), and Delhi's braveheart (Roy 2012). 2 This interrogation of Indian state and society by the protesting publics on India gate illuminates commonplace binaries of state/society, tradition/modern, and liberal/ illiberal. Media narratives presented the Indian state as if it were under siege from