Bhurra's application last week drew two sharply differing public responses. The first was that of extreme outrage. The second, condoned — even hailed — it as a step by which a raped woman could get justice and regain her honour.For those who came in late to story let me briefly summarise it. On September 7, ’03, a nurse at the Shanti Mukund Hospital in Delhi was brutally raped by Bhurra, a ward boy in the same hospital. He also gouged out her right eye for good measure. When the case came up in court last week, Bhurra gave an undertaking to marry the nurse to make good his act of assault. The additional sessions judge did not dismiss this out of hand. He asked the assaulted woman for her response to it. She rejected the offer in unequivocal terms. How can she accept a beast who has “handicapped my very sense of being, more than my physical self, as my husband?” she asked. She went on to say that Bhurra’s application “is to further humiliate, insult and denigrate my dignity. He committed a crime which should not be repeated”. The judge, perhaps chastened by the protests that greeted his decision, then awarded a life term to the accused after observing that Bhurra’s was a “false, frivolous, mischievous and defamatory application with mala fide intention to evade punishment and mislead the court”. (One wonders why he had then entertained the application in the first place.)This young, traumatised woman needs to be hailed as another one of our unsung heroines for her personal courage and clarity of thinking. Her words would hearten those who have for decades have been fighting against this crime, on the streets and in the courts. But what should concern us here is that there is a sizable public opinion — quite possibly a majority opinion — that believes that Bhurra’s proposal should have been entertained and that the court was right in taking it seriously. Indeed, there are innumerable instances in the country where raped women have married their assaulters with the court’s intervention and even approval.The phenomenon causes deep revulsion in many of us but nevertheless requires to be understood if we are to respond to it in any meaningful way. This link between rape and marriage must not surprise us because it is as old as human history itself. The word “rape” has its provenance in rapere, Latin for steal or seize. The act of “stealing” the Sabine women by raping them and making them “wives” is the foundational myth of ancient Rome. This incident of mass rape is believed to have helped the city state stabilise itself. Interestingly, if we are to examine this particular myth, the injury caused by the assault was borne, not by the women — what they experienced, what they suffered, does not figure in the legend — but their fathers and brothers, whose honour was seen to have been compromised. The Sabine men battle the Romans in protest against the “stealing” of their women; the women themselves are portrayed as having quickly reconciled themselves to their state and making peace between the warring groups.Compensating the father for the rape of daughters was institutionalised in ancient law. As Susan Brownmiller notes in her 1975 classic, Against Our Will: “Rape entered the law through the back door, as it were, as a property crime of man against man. It was the theft of virginity, an embezzlement of his daughter’s fair price in the market.” The Babylonians, for instance, laid down that if a rapist was unmarried, he paid the father of the assaulted woman three times her marriage price and married the woman. Hebrew law, scholars point out, actually defined rape as “bride capture”. Closer home, the episode involving Sita’s agnipariksha was all about how being “damaged” by rape — the possibility of Ravana having assaulted Sita — can threaten a loving marriage. The woman has to prove herself to be “pure”, “unravished” before her husband can accept her again as his wife. As the character — a raped woman — that Aishwarya Rai plays in Dil Aapke Paas Hai whispers to her saviour and hero, “I am not fit for you.”Three important points need to be flagged in these discrete examples. One, that women are mere goods to be transferred from one group of men to another group of men; two, that rape causes these goods to be “damaged” and claimed; three, marriage — the ultimate reconciler in all these cases — is not an equal institution.Given our history, given our myths, given our practices, should we then really be surprised by Bhurra’s proposal? Should we be shocked at those who believe it was a honourable one? I think not. But it demonstrates how far we, as a society are, from, one, recognising a woman’s sexual autonomy and her right to her bodily integrity and, two, incorporating the principle in our criminal-judicial processes and, more fundamentally, in the way we think. Every time, a group like the Shiv Sena argues that women invite rape by the way they dress, every time a policeman believes that women get raped because they are “cheap”; every time someone argues that the only succour for a raped woman is to marry the man who attacked her since she’s “damaged goods”; every time a judge entertains, even for a second, a proposal like that of Bhurra’s — it shows how far we are from this goal.There is little doubt that our criminal and legal apparatuses, shackled by conditioned thinking and age-old practices, are ill-equipped to tackle the issue. Those working in the field of women and violence have argued that the people responsible for the criminal-justice system in the country have played a decisive role in reinforcing existing biases. It is they who persist with making the unconscionable link between rape and marriage. It is they who perpetrate the continuing subordination of women. As the fulcrum of any corrective intervention the country makes, they must now reform, or be reformed, in the manner they handle such cases; document and analyse data; reach conclusions; protect the self-confidence of the assaulted; and award punishment. We are talking here of a complete ideological re-wiring.This cannot happen without simultaneous and substantive reform in existing law — the very fact that rape within marriage is not recognised as a crime in the statute books indicates the significant gaps in our jurisprudence. It will not happen if we, as part of society, are content to remain entrenched in the matrix of misogyny that is our common legacy.
