No woman no cry/No woman no cry/Oh, my little sister/Don’t shed no tears…” Thus went the iconic Bob Marley’s words of assuagement, to a woman in the ghetto, gesturing at a better tomorrow around the corner. The only precondition is that the woman does not submit to fear or terminal depression, or resignedly accept defeat. For a land filled with upturned moustaches and masculinist mottos, it has again fallen upon the woman to stand up and look the horror of history in the eye—and force it to back off. And again, they have not failed history’s burden.
In Kathua, where the Western Himalayan foothills tumble down to meet the great plains, where the cherubic little Asifa became the face of something larger than she would have understood, it took a woman lawyer to stand up to a whole hostile phalanx, the local political/legal establishment. It is her courage that ensured the Supreme Court has taken up the matter, after upbraiding the local bar association for obstructing justice. Unnao, in central UP, is over 1,000 km from Kathua.
But the distance became immaterial last week as they were yoked together in India’s new cartography of horror. And in the fact of the woman not being just a victim of male violence, but the only real source of resistance to it. Here, a 17-year-old fought off hell as she insisted on an FIR being filed, losing her father in battle.
Our mythic lore may, at first glance, seem to be a compendium of stories about men fighting other men over women and territory—with an equivalence between the two forms of ‘property’. But look deeper and one feels other currents. At the moment of the deepest moral crisis in the Mahabharata, when Draupadi is being disrobed in full court, she is not stunned into paralysis. Rather, the strongest, most thorough-going critique of the male order unfolds then, voiced by her. “You have no rights over me and my body,” she tells Yudhishtira. “You have already lost your rights over yourself.” That is what today’s women are saying too.