The seeds of violence in domesticity: The case of post ... - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies 

ISSN (USA): 1948-1845 (Print), 1948-1853 (Electronic) 

The seeds of violence in domesticity: The case of post-Independence India 

Alessandro Monti 

In the final sequence of the Hindi film Dharmaputra (1961), when India is deep in the 

miscarrying throes of Partition, Nehru is seen and heard saying that are Indians all those who 

want to be such. This statement instructs inclusion and at the same times establishes implied 

norms of belonging. What is the real meaning of Indianness? Which specific, and perhaps 

discriminating, characters are requested for select inclusion? Coming back to the film, Nehru’s 

declaration of corporate identity concludes and in some way seals the eukumenic happy ending 

of the story, in which a Muslim boy (now a militant young man) born of an unwed daughter of a 

nawab is adopted by a friendly Hindu couple. The boy grows up to a fanatic anti-Muslim 

fundamentalist, notwithstanding the mild attitude nurtured by his adoptive family circle. He 

would kill his parents (which are unknown to him as such) and burn down their house. His true 

identity is finally revealed to him and he sees himself as someone non-existent, a blank file in the 

maiden archive of Indian Nationhood. 

However his temporary invisibility (one which is restored to accepted identity thanks to 

the love of a Hindu woman) indicates how the words spoken to the nation by Nehru move in the 

sphere of pre-modern toleration, rather than tolerance, and suggest or rather require a 

presumption of general acceptance. As a matter of fact this pronunciation reflects the major 

refusal of shared belonging in difference which is at the roots of the split between India and 

Pakistan. We should consider again what happens in Dharmaputra – apparently it revolves 

around a comprehensive metaphor of unity through difference which is illustrated by the bridge 

that connects the two adjoning homes, the Hindu and the Muslim. This bridge allows 

communication and coexistence between the two cultures and ways of life withouts their actual 

merging together – it generates measures of reciprocate neighbourhood but not really 

comprehensive transitions of culture. The lifelong friendship of the two families, including 

respectively a modernized Hindu (a medical man) and a more formal household, still imbued 

with the traditional Nawabi heritage, does involve the hegemonic stiffness of culture rather then 

the possibility of moving across it. 

Their relationship is simply one of agglomeration, one which yields to assimilation when 

the need to include arises. So, the Muslim adopted boy is turned into a Hindu: his transfer of 

identity does not safeguard difference in the individual and replaces conformity for tolerance. 

Such an intransitive feature constitutes perhaps the determinative character that lies at the very 

heart of nationalistic instructed Indianess. The signifier for corporate identity takes charge of the 

twofold aspect in a way that both absorbs the literal plea for a coterminous acceptance and 

maintains the archaic refusal to integrate. The continued distinction in unity will lead to rampant 

communalism, whose ideological (or religious mindset) aim purposes to achieve uniformity 

through violence. 

In Dharmaputra Hindu fanaticism wants to erase contiguity and co-presence in culture by 

destroying the Muslim portion of the symbolically joint household. This cleasing purification by 

fire extends the diasporic movement consequent to Partition from the outside rejection that 

enforces people to migrate to domestic extraneous marginality. This pattern rejecting extensive 

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“The seeds of violence in domesticity: The case of post-Independence India,” Alessandro Monti 

JPCS, Vol. 2, No 3, July 2011. http://www.jpcs.in



conformity out of the corporate archive of nationhood needs an agency mediating uniformity: the 

refusal of a national eukumene imposes a regulative device, one which would be able to act at a 

horizontally extended but closely controlled level. Thus the basic procedures of inclusion and 

exclusion are delegated to the authority of the traditional family circle through the control of 

individual behaviour and the imposition of pre-ordained patterns of identity, which constitute a 

consequent specific character of Indianness. 

This double edge both implies toleration and at the same requests conformity. Toleration 

is conveyed in the film by the domestic bridge – of course a two-way passage from one house to 

the other, but an episodic interconnection not meant family people to opt in or out of their 

specific cultural frameworks. The Hindu young man born unknowingly to him a Muslim 

inscribes fanaticism in his cultural code, as an excessive sign of adhesion to a founding notion of 

corporate purity. Thus the only instance in the film of full transition within a presumptive unity 

leads to a personal behaviour of rupture and separation. It would perhaps be possible to analyze 

the feeling of active hostility thrust forward by the young man as a confused mnestic semiawareness 

of his diminished identity as a nagari, a citizen of the nation. To him not beeing a 

Hindu means separation from himself, a personal Partition which makes him remember his own 

true identity as a lost and non-existent self. 

The partitioned condition of this character indicates exile within or shared nationhood, a 

status which might equated to what happened to the refugees at the Partition. We could possibly 

quote a recent collection of Sindhi short stories, Unbordered Memories (2009), in which the 

enforced separation from the native regional place endorses loss and estrangement. This attitude 

generates a retrospective and finally regressive time-lag which erases the present from any 

positive consciousness, by substituting it with abstract culture (or its alter egoes, religion or 

ethnicity or whatever kind of belonging in the social sphere), so as to make the subject live and 

act in a static vacuum. We might take what happens to the Muslim boy in the film as an extended 

metaphor of pre-modern tolerance, one which emphasizes culture, religion, ethnicity et alia as 

values that cannot be exchanged or mediated and fully integrated one another. 

To ensure legitimacy in nationhood the invention of Hindustan as a select land (“a very 

good country” as a man in a Benares gully whispered to the passing-by foreigners), the 

instrumental choice of domesticity as an added moral value was and still is the corporate agency 

for the general effort to control society and make it homogeneous. Domesticity meant and still 

means the refusal of Western ways in private life and the emphasis of difference in morality. So 

difference becomes the characterizing all-mark of identity in the Independent Indian nation. 

However, in this discourse difference assumes a restricted meaning since it does not entail a 

horizontal spreading, one which would allow transversal intersections within the multi-faced 

national communities, but fosters in its stead a hierarchical pyramid. 

Of this structural division in the national body casteism constitutes undoubtedly the most 

blatant and usavoury side. The question is set rather sentimentally in the film Sujata (1960), in 

which the issue of adoption (an untouchable orphaned girl joins a high-caste family) highlights 

her controversial domestic status, simultaneously of someone which is inside or outside the 

authorized family circle. The emotional tension in the film splits the young woman in the 

domestic text between a daughter of the house and an embarassing outcaste whose role cannot 

actually exceed the subaltern position of a servant. This further instance of toleration within the 

social range cuts at least symbolically across the guidelines of which will be the politics of 


JPCS, Vol. 2, No 3, July 2011. http://www.jpcs.in 

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reservation concerning the so-called Backwards started by the Mandal commission since the 

1990s (hence the mandalisation of India). If the debate in the film on the possible inclusive value 

of family adoption might recall communalism, one can wonder if the passage from the domestic 

(or family) circle would instruct de facto dissimilarity or continuity. 

The answer to this query should consider how the honour of a family depends on the 

identity of its acquired members. Thus in the 70s Indian cinema dealt extensively with the theme 

of a daughter-in-law which because of various reasons had entered the family circle with an 

assumed identity. Such is, for example, the dramatic kernel of Kati Patang (1970) in which a 

missed bride, on the run the very hour of her marriage, replaces a widowed friend of hers, also a 

mother, who dies in a train crash after their casual meeting. An extension of this plot involves a 

mother who is obliged to leave her newborn. She joins the adoptive family as an ayah, in order 

not to be separated from her child, usually a boy. In Aradhana (1969) she even charges herself 

with murder in order to protect her boy. 

It would be deeply wrong to evaluate these films on sheer terms of melodrama. They are 

above all concerned with homogeneity within the social body and the assessment of a true 

acceptable identity. To this purpose they mediate between the inner, or oikumenic, circle 

represented by the extended family group, and the external, or eukumenic, nation-state. Outside 

this ruling basic connection, one which authorizes authority through the domestic micro-cell, a 

dissemination of power, or powers, endorses self-authorizations. The patriarchal bias, for 

instance of Indian society generates non only domestic violence or an excess in rapes, or in the 

so-called honour killings but also stands as the primary cause for baby-girl foeticide. This 

malpractice can be viewed as a misuse or an abuse of domestic authority, since it is aimed at 

maintaining the social level of a family or at getting rid of an obstacle towards a shining upwards 

progress. 

This behaviour also pertains to the concerns for identity within the domestic milieu, given 

its worry for social position. It still moves around the dichotomy inclusion-exclusion, in a way 

that enacts too pragmatically the clause of non-belonging. Foeticide is meant to maintain family 

status and consequently to preserve its honour. So, it cumulates responsibility on women even 

before their (refused) births by considering them duhitā (duh, milk), those who waste the 

resources of the family. This view includes the notion of arth, banally profit, but in a more 

complex perspective the care, maintenance and increase of family wealth. This notion stands at 

the very heart of the fictional domestic sagas set in the merchants’ circle (bania); we should 

recall to the purpose the novels Home (2007) by Manju Kapur and Aftertaste (2010) by Namita 

Devidayal. 

It would be apparent by now that the concept of domesticity encloses a certain amount of 

violence, both in the defense and in the imposition of a certified morality and in the search for 

profit, as it occurs with the request of dowry. Marriages for dowry lead often to death for wives 

whose merciless reduction to cattle obliterates again the unstable border between life and death, 

as equally happens in the practice of foeticide. Since the dowry wives are assessed with regard to 

the money they bring to the receiving family, they can be disposed of when their economical 

value ceases. However, these acts of violent expulsion from the domestic circle are not officially 

endorsed by the authority of the nation-state. As a matter of fact, while acting, at least nominally, 

against individual or group domestic violence and casteism the judicial body oscillates between 

punishment against moral infringement or, by matchmaking in controversial elopements. 



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The sphere of control may also involve police prevention. Such is the case of a young 

couple surprised by a patrol at night in a village while talking. They were identified and brought 

to the police station, where it appeared that they were planning elopment. Given the recurrence 

of such episodes, elopment has become an offence, one equated to abduction. The exchange of 

responsibilities between family and nation-state conceals what a newspaper has termed “caste 

drama”. The social status of the couple indicates a double standard of hypergamy – as far as 

castes are concerned he is a brahmin (but a driver, so relatively low in the professional 

hierarchies), whereas she, although being a dalit, is given as a postgraduate. Having eloped, the 

couple first married on November 23, 2010 (a second marriage took again place in early March 

2011), but when the girl came to know that the boy had lied to “her” apropos of his caste she 

filed criminal charges against him. A further side to the issue concerns the possible harassment, 

and eventually death, of a dalit wife in a brahmin household. In the Hindustan Times chronicle it 

is reported that “the police took an undertaking from the youth’s family to make sure that 

nothing wrong happened to Kiran Devi [the Dalit wife] later on”. After her son was sent to jail, 

“his mother Rami Devi filed a writ before the high court in January alleging that her son was the 

victim of police frame-up”. Later on “the girl expressed her desire to marry him and drop the 

charges”. (See Appendix 1, for a case of compulsory marriage, in which court and police 

authority substitute the family circle). 

Casteism and domestic harassment stand bleak at the background of the whole story, but 

a whole string of self-authorizing councils or self-styled courts stand in-between family circles 

and the authority of the nation-state. Among them are especially notorious the illegal khap 

panchayats, which ban women on wearing jeans or punish, even with death, intercaste 

marriages. The term khap (khāp, Hindi, m/plu) can mean group, tribe and designates councils 

based on caste and on the respect of its norms. Their authority, together with a host of similar 

grass-root institutions puts well to light the dissemination of authorities which is typical of the 

Hindu society. (See Appendix 2). This fragmentation, on decentralization of responsibilities, is 

partly coincident in purpose and values with the power of the nation-state, but in most cases 

interpretates and enacts a stiff conformity to backward tradition. They stand in-between the 

intimations of corporate morality (behaviour) operated via nationalism by the nation-state and 

the networks of micro-social organisms represented by the extended families. 

In some ways and matters (especially when rape is concerned) they substitute absentee 

officers of police, but as a rule they guarantee such issues as modesty in dressing and intervene 

for a further and final safeguard of family honour. These intermediate institutions promote as a 

matter of fact violence within the domestic domain and keep rural India outside the pale of 

modernity and development. Similar agencies, these ones as by-products of political ideology, 

spread communalism, particularly in cities and towns, introducing discriminating separation 

where tolerance should instead reign. They disseminate seeds of violence in the name of the 

archaic and imagine on their own what is right or wrong. 

In the “strange” case of cops acting as matchmakers marriage is enforced on a 

controversial, and reluctant on the part of the girl, couple by an authorized and imposing (not 

actually authorizing) bench, in contrast with a self-stated authority like the khap panchayat. The 

ensuing order to marry the girl and the promise and guarantee that the brahmin family of the boy 

won’t harass the dalit wife, or won’t even stage a domestic death, is meant to ensure or at least 

protect the safety of the girl. Harassed or murdered wives or women constitute a major theme in 



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Indian filmography. These stories are set either in urban low-middle class (Fire, 1996), in the 

Bombayte urbanite milieu (Bhoot, 2003) or in the expatriate experience (Provoked, 2006; 

Videsh. Heaven on Earth, 2008). They highlight violence in the domestic circle as a 

dispossessing sign of refused or marginalized belonging, in a way that defers to an 

undistinguished tomorrow the supposed affability of national inclusion stated by Nehru. 

Post-colonial Indian identity relied and relies on the family cell, as the interpreter of 

accepted corporate behaviour and the guardian of authorized hierarchies. In the transition from 

the colonial period to the post-age of Independence whatever diasporic movement outside 

homogeneity and homologation acted around issues of unconscious mimicry, to symbolise the 

confusion caused by the mottled reality concealing behind the multicultural layers of the Indian 

world. This might be the case with Dharmaputra, a film in which transitions of identity from one 

community to another are frown upon. This theme is rehearsed in the many films concerning 

assumed identities within the domestic circle, whose closed frame generates continuous 

intimations of expulsion and discriminating violence. The complex network implying both 

belonging and refusal goes beyond the authority of the nation-state, since it maintains the domain 

of the archaic (casteism, fundamentalism) within the plea for modernity. 

Consequently, the power of the nation-state should be viewed as split between corporate 

authorizations and communal autonomies asserting difference. The clash takes primarily place 

inside the domestic sphere, out of which arise the basic marks allowing or forbidding the 

exchange across communities in terms of caste and religion. Khap panchayats within villages 

and rural communities define the next step towards separation, in a bid to maintain supposed 

specificity. On a higher level, the centrality and pan-Indianness of the political parties is 

nowadays crumbling down in terms of regionalism, casteism and religion. These are provoking 

micro-partitions within the unified body of the Indian nation, from communalism to insurgency. 

Domestic control is no more sufficient to encapsulate corporate ethos within safe channels of 

unity in difference. The flaw perhaps lies in the imposition of corporate authority to domestic 

life, as a form of genetic heritage which cannot be changed, since discriminates and makes the 

difference of Indian culture, in terms of nationalism and superiority. 

__________ 

Biography 

Alessandro Monti is former Full Professor of English Language and Literature and Head of the 

Department of Oriental Studies (University of Turin, Italy). Visiting Professor at the Kakatya 

University (Warangal, A.P.), 2002, and Research Fellow (Indian Centre for Cultural Relations) 

with the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, BHU, Varanasi), 2011: Research 

on Indian Cinema. He founded and edited till December 2010 the critical series DOST 

(Department of Oriental Studies in Turin). He collaborates with several Indian publishers. He 

resigned from the University in September 2010. 



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Works cited 

Devidayal, Namita. Aftertaste. Random House India, 2010. 

Kapur, Manju. Home. Delhi: Random House India, 2006; London: Faber and Faber, 2007. 

Kothari, Rita (ed.). Unbordered Memories. Sindhi Stories of Partition. Penguin Books India, 2009. 

Filmography 

Yash Chopra, Dharmaputra, 1961. 

Deepa Mehta, Fire, 1996. 

Deepa Mehta, Videsh - Heaven on Earth, 2008. 

Jag Mundhra, Provoked: A True Story, 2006. 

Bimal Roy, Sujata, 1960. 

Shakti Samanta, Aradhana, 1969. 

Shakti Samanta, Kati Patang, 1970. 

Ram Gopal Varma, Bhoot, 2003. 



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APPENDICES 

APPENDIX 1 

The Times of India, Lucknow, 3 March 2011 

The clash between the judicial body and the unofficial councils (which regulate on their 

own many sectors and areas of Indian society) is less antagonistic than one can suppose. It rather 

involves different forms of interference with “the personal lives of people”. Often police are 

reluctant or unwilling to intervene, especially when the plight of women is concerned. 



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Hindustan Times, Lucknow, 3 March 2011 



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APPENDIX 2 



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The Times of India, Lucknow, 20 March 2011 

Traditional agencies of power at the outskirts of the political and judiciary bodies mete 

out punishment and so-called ethical norms of behaviour, according to family honour and the 

defence of caste and religion. They are de facto quasi autonomous with respect to central 

authorities, in a self-styled role of true guardians maintaining indianness. 



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