Why India is obsessed with a woman's virginity

Activist and CPIML leader Kavita Krishnan’s piece in Scroll.in points to a malignant psychosis in the Sanghi mind, where sex and dissent are conflated inseparably. This comment came in response to the JNU dossier’s allegations of “anti-national” and sexually immoral conduct inside JNU, made as if the two amounted to the same thing, and that they pointed to the same seditious intent.

As bizarre as that may sound to a reasonable mind, that does not stop it from also ringing true when mini-skirts are being termed seditious, when politicians like Subramanian Swamy have repeatedly called Krishnan a “Naxalite who has free sex” as if one were walking hand-in-hand with the other.

That victim blaming is still prevalent in cases of rape — with an HT investigation reporting that a rape accused in India’s capital has an 83 per cent chance of being acquitted — and recent developments like cell phones being seized for being “dangerous” from women in Gujarat, a state whose development model the BJP government is and has been pushing for quite some time, only make the situation more stark.

It is this psychosis that is visible in the JNU dossier — a prequel to the JNU script the government is following, in which fantasies of “free sex” galore are based on bogus condom-counting exercises; the document manages to call itself a “dossier” drafted by JNU faculty members.

It is all inexplicable, but, oddly enough, it fits right in with the absurdities and contradictions that have historically surrounded the treatment of a woman’s virtue (read chastity) in India.

After all, are these events any more baffling than questions like why fair skin is considered purer, why inter-caste/religion marriages are a taboo, or why honour killing exists or why virginity is the crowning hallmark of female virtue to this day?

Not even goddesses are exempt from such attacks, as evidenced by Sita’s vanvaas or agni-pareeksha – tests, in essence, to determine chastity as a factor of purity, and more importantly, righteousness.

Such rigid paranoia about the female sexuality traces its roots to the Rig Veda and Manusmriti in ancient India, but India is hardly alone in historically having been paranoid about a woman’s sexual will.

English mindset, in a collection of patriarchal literature that dwarfs the Indian, displays the exact brand of anxiety and psychosis. Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” highlights the same misogyny as the Ramacharitmanas, and Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling displays the same anxiety about the ability to verify a woman’s chastity as Sita’s agnee-pareeksha, and they are amongst the greatest of the works of 17^th Century England - all written under Elizabeth – a monarch whose most flaunted virtue was that she was the "Virgin Queen", so much so that the first American colony of Britain was named Virginia after her.

However, that is not all they have in common, for they are deeply patriarchal historical societies, and patriarchy must presuppose a dominion over the female sexuality for its effective existence.

History stands witness to this conflation, for in the prehistoric hunting-gathering stage, studies of deciphered paintings show that women and men were “separate but equal” and female sexuality was accepted. In fact, the earliest religious references in history are to the “mother-goddess”.

However, with the first traces of a class system emerging as early as the Mesopotamian civilisation, the first traces of the subjugation of a woman began to emerge.

That is far from a coincidence - it is the design. Whenever a class-structure exists, it must ensure a check

What better way is there for “one of them” to become “one of us” than a willing female – what better way for someone to get a foot in the door other than to use the mother-goddess’ power against her?

For example, in rigid caste or class-based societies like the Brahmanical order of the Vedic age, caste was a source of power that was closely guarded in institutions of social standing by those who had power and were wont to share it. Same was the case with colonial Britain (coinciding with the Virgin Queen’s rule), where a stark demarcation of class was supposed to be maintained between the coloniser and the colonised institutionally.

In such circumstances, the independently acting female will was a maverick spanner in the works, for it represented a potential-sabotage of the structure which ensures the centralisation of power — especially when the prevalent description of the female mind in both societies was vain, vengeful, silly and utterly promiscuous.

If unchecked, free female sexuality represented the threat of collapse to the entire structure, for it was tied to marriage which, in turn, was tied to property, wealth, status and, most importantly, child-bearing through which the subjugated could potentially bypass his class’ subjugation.

Therefore, the Brahmins in ancient Indian patriarchy – beneficiaries of the caste-system, and, incidentally creators of the religious texts they then imposed as god’s diktat –or the British (enslavers of many races) obsessed with guarding the female sexual agency lest she give the “other”, more often than not a projected enemy, a window in.

This mentality of those in power seeking to retain power for themselves is how sex becomes seditious. A display of independent sexuality like skirts becomes a red flag to the government because it represents a rebellion to organised structures of power and threatens to destabilise them from within.

Additionally, this is how marital rape is explained away as an integral part of the family structure. Rape becomes a method to impose power in deeply entrenched patriarchal societies, especially societies in conflict - like Kashmir - where it is deployed as a show of, essentially, who is the boss.

Impregnating the women of the conquered is a trope that has historically been used in countless wars, and is still being used in radical Islam, because birth cuts through the structures of society.

A Dalit’s offspring with a Brahmin woman, thus, becomes the ultimate nightmare, and centuries of propaganda have therefore been waged in demonising such an activity. Texts like Manusmriti in Vedic India and “The anatomy of Melancholy” in the West have even advocated violence for husbands to keep their wives in check

For example, the word “slut”, originally used etymologically by Geoffrey Chaucer for a “dirty, untidy or slovenly woman” came to acquire the “dirty” connotation, except in the sexual domain where it was a synonym for being "sexually liberated".

Similarly, populist Aryan versus Dravidian conflict propaganda can explain why fair skin is considered better, since dark was the colour of the “other”, besides being on the inconvenient side of the colour metaphor.

Cultural phenomena like cinema have reflected this mentality – think about every vamp and heroine through the ages, with films as recent as Cocktail.

The vamp is dressed in western attire, is westerly named and always has an unfortunate end, whilst the heroine is traditionally Indian, chaste, virginal – the “ideal” Bharatiya naari.

Once the vested interest behind such partial proclamations of what constitutes the “Bharatiya naari” is understood, it puts a lot of things into context, none of which is the reality behind the supposed ungodliness of inter-caste/inter-religion alliance.

It also explains, perhaps more sinisterly, that the rising dedication India’s stalwarts of modesty display in protecting the honour of their “sisters” is directly contradicted by the rising number of rapes, as also the fact that most females in the country’s capital will attest that they’ve probably never felt safe in Delhi.

It is all a smokescreen after all, of protecting its share of power and wealth in the name of women’s honour.

An honour killing is a subject of power way before it is a question of honour. However, patriarchy conflates the two as well – a conflation as absurd, and yet as true, as that of sex and sedition.

Patriarchy has historically engineered these conflations, not in misunderstanding, but as circumventions of what they cannot admit to: their extreme paranoia that some woman somewhere may choose who she lays with and their whole structure comes tumbling down.

The biggest loopholes in rigid power structures – be it the government, the army or society – are agencies of independent thought. Therefore, the soldier is trained not to think; similarly the woman is being trained not to choose, but the outcome in both cases can be equally disastrous to the institution.

A woman’s independent sexual identity is patriarchy's greatest loophole. Like Kansa of myth who saw an image of Vishnu in every reflective surface due to his fear, the grand patriarch sees a vagina. It is this fear that brings with it the psychosis we are merely witnessing and struggling to comprehend, when really it’s the oldest story in the book: that of those in power seeking to retain power with whatever means necessary. Not much has changed.