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

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Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN (USA): 1948-1845 (Print), 1948-1853 (Electronic) 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 “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 82
Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies ISSN (USA): 1948-1845 (Print), 1948-1853 (Electronic) 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. “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 83
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