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From Womb to Tomb — and Every Place in Between

From Womb to Tomb — and Every Place in Between

Over the years, I have tried to understand violence against women. Not merely the violent act itself, but the thinking that makes the act possible. The man who hits his wife is responsible for the violence; the man who rapes a child is responsible for the rape; the man who kills a woman in the name of honour is responsible for the murder. But individual culpability does not prevent us from examining the social ideas that make such violence possible. Again and again, I come back to the same underlying idea: that a woman is not fully understood as an autonomous human being. She is somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter-in-law. Her identity is repeatedly defined through the relationships she occupies until the woman herself becomes almost invisible.

I have spent years wondering about the entitlement behind violence. Is it habit, culture, sexuality, power, or the tacit permission given by generations of silence? Increasingly, I think it is all of these things, built upon something more fundamental: the belief that a woman’s autonomy is conditional.

A woman is neither chattel nor property. She does not need to be led through life by another’s hand, nor does she require permission to have a mind, a voice, an ambition, a body, or an opinion. She is as human as the man standing beside her. Yet so much of our social vocabulary tells us otherwise.

We say a girl has been given away in marriage. We speak of her being sent to another home. We congratulate a family on having settled a daughter. We teach her to adjust, to compromise, to keep the peace, to tolerate, to forgive, to protect the reputation of her family and then, after marriage, to protect the reputation of the family she has entered. We do not merely ask her to enter a marriage; we often ask her to surrender pieces of herself in order to make that marriage work.

The subcontinent’s deeply embedded idea of “kanya daan”, even where the terminology itself is not used, captures something of this mentality. A daughter leaves the home in which she was raised and is expected to make another family’s home her own. A son who establishes a separate home for his wife can be regarded as a bad son, while a daughter who leaves her parents is simply doing what daughters are supposed to do. A son who spends money on his parents is celebrated for his devotion; a daughter who does the same can be made to feel that she has somehow crossed an invisible boundary. The marriage contract may create a new family, but our social imagination often refuses to allow it to become one. The woman is transferred; the man remains.

These cultural transactions are frequently given a veneer of sanctity they do not possess—which brings us to a crucial distinction between South Asian social custom and Islam. Much of what we have normalised as religiously sanctioned behaviour towards women is rooted not in faith, but in centuries of regional patriarchy and family structures. Islam did not begin with the idea that women were transferable property. The Quran........

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