It's sad a woman’s honour is still defined by a man’s hold over her
Honour is a simple English word that means high respect and esteem. This simple word, however, has acquired a skewed meaning when viewed in context of a woman through misogynist lens in our society.
In India, honour no longer remains an innate attribute of a woman’s personality or individuality. Indeed, it is not even possessed by her. Rather, it is reduced to a concept influenced by the social constructs created by the patriarchs. It is being nurtured by the idea of a woman who, to be ideal, must aspire to be submissive, obedient and easily controllable. A woman’s honour has, thus, come to be defined by the extent of a man’s hold over her. The protection of a woman’s honour is, therefore, not the protection of her "bodily integrity" but her "body" which is under the command of the men around her.
How else can one explain the lack of discomfort or agitations over sexual assault of an eight-month-old baby girl, but violent protests bringing the country to a standstill over portrayal of a character in a movie, fictional or otherwise?
The protestors claimed that the depiction of the character in the movie had hurt the "honour" of Rajput women. Is that really true? Or was the fight really about male pride?
Men relish the glorification of a subdued subordinate within the patriarchal social construct. Rajput men are no exception. How could they witness a Rajput maharani dancing in "indecent midriff baring clothes", taking control over her own body and exhibiting free spirit? The fight, therefore, was to regain the power imbalance. Had they been fighting to protect the honour or the bodily integrity of the women, they would have raised alarms at every incident of sexual assault. This, however, is not the situation.
The basic premise of such agitations is the protection of the supposed "fragile and easily damaged" status of women. The status, which in a patriarchal society, is a misogynist idea construing a woman’s honour to be a "commodity" in the hands of the men who have the free will to either preserve it or destroy it. And this "commodity" invariably is in the possession of and is attached to the family of the woman.
This commodification of woman’s honour is also the reason behind retributive violence practiced by the khap panchayats as a justice delivery mechanism. After all, that explains the punishing of the female members of the families for the wrongs committed by their male relatives. To illustrate, in 2015, a khap panchayat in Uttar Pradesh ordered villagers to rape two sisters and then parade them naked as their brother had committed the offence of eloping with a girl of higher caste.
Raping women is considered to be the means of causing disrepute to their families. Honour killings and honour suicides are also the consequence of such misogynist understanding of "honour". Parents often murder their daughters or force them to commit suicides when they are raped as they are considered to have defiled the honour of the family by getting raped. The victims of sexual violence are blamed for causing disrepute to the family. No one really talks about the offenders sullying the honour of their families by their act of sexually violating an individual. In fact, the victims, as a sort of compromise, are married off to their offenders; the underlying premise being that the "commodity" sullied by the offender is rendered incapable of being accepted by another man.
Practices of sati and jauhar are further examples of imposed honour where the women commit suicide through self-immolation upon death of their husbands or to avoid being captured after the husband’s defeat in a war - basically to yet again preserve the male pride or the family honour.
The societal construction of ownership of female honour by a man is reflected even in our penal laws. Only a husband can prosecute for adultery if his wife has an extra-marital relationship with a man, married or otherwise. A wife cannot prosecute her husband if he has an extra-marital relationship with an unmarried woman. And if she is a married woman, only her husband can prosecute. The entire concept is that a husband owns the honour of his wife and can prosecute another man for defiling it. Again, female honour and chastity are central to the understanding of sexual offences under the laws which always view men as the perpetrators and women as the victims.
The present definition of rape reasserts the idea of dominance and subjection by holding that men contain the power to humiliate and violate women. It nurtures the socially constructed power imbalance rendering women as the vulnerable community at the mercy of the "superior" beings, thereby advancing the depraved ideologies. Such laws, though ostensibly for protection of women, in fact perpetuate further victimisation and marginalisation.
The fact of the matter is that such conceptualisation of female honour has served as a tool for the patriarchal society to control and regulate the behaviour of women so as to force them to the position of subordinates and suffer not so subtle oppression. Indeed, the English word, honour, has been distorted beyond recognition in our society.