Veena Das | Sexual Violence: The Crisscrossing of the Spectacular and the Ordinary

Political life in India has been punctuated by spectacular instances of sexual violence whether evident during political upheavals such as the Partition of India in 1947 or the pogroms against minorities as in the case of the infamous violence against Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002.  But even when political life seems relatively calm, sometimes a singular event such as the case of a 23-year-old girl in Delhi in 2012 in a public bus, bursts into publicity and stimulates massive public outrage and produces much reflection on legal reform, and ways of making public spaces safe for women. In this paper, I juxtapose two cases of sexual violence – one that came to be known as the Nirbhaya case that was not allowed to sink into oblivion because of feminist mobilizations against the dangers that   stalk women in the streets of Delhi and the second of a child from a slum area, around the same time, that provides a lens to view the everyday life of the law when violence is absorbed into what I call a pathological normativity.  Is it possible in such circumstances to think of an exit? What are the residues of sexual violence that are secreted even in those cases where “successful” prosecution of the perpetrators happens? In what manner does the idea of exit, evoke notions of boundaries and limits to violence that deflect our eyes away from violence that lurks in the everyday ?

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author, most recently, of Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2007), Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2015) and Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropological Essays After Wittgenstein (forthcoming). Among the many awards and honors she has received are honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, University of Edinburgh, Bern University, and Durham University.