Two Tragedies and a Rising of Social Justice Consciousness

Rape_protest_PTI
Protest on December 20, 2012 in Lucknow, India against the New Delhi rape case
Image ©PTI via newindianexpress.com

By Sayantani DasGupta

My recent trip to India was marked by two horrific tragedies: one in my home country and another in the country of my family origins.

There is very little seemingly in common with a brutal gang rape in New Delhi and an elementary school killing in Connecticut. Except that both have ignited the hearts and minds of citizens around the world toward the work of peace and social justice. And that in both cases, there is so much to do. 

There has been much written lately about the brutal gang rape, torture, and eventual death of a 23-year old college student in New Delhi, India.

There have been smart analyses from within the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora of rape culture and gender violence in the Indian context,  rigid definitions of masculinity, femininity and heteronormativity, of how this one young woman’s death has brought back into the light of memory so many other women’s lives.

What else can be said? How can I give adequate words to such anguish and anger, outrage, and grief?

Today, in reading this interview of Eve Ensler regarding the New Delhi rape and subsequent protests, I was initially nervous. I worried if the well-known American feminist would take the tack of ‘looking Eastward with disgust’pointing to Indian patriarchy or Indian contexts as being somehow ‘more’ enabling of gender violence.

But instead, Ensler took the path of solidarity. When asked about how Indian culture might specifically play into rape culture, Ensler replied:

That will be a wrong approach. I think there is patriarchy, and there is humanity, and there is pressure. Rape, harassment, incest, dowry, and even bringing up girls as less as significant to men, are all things not particular to India. The issue at hand may manifest itself a little different culturally here and there. But there is a global patriarchy that is controlled by the methodology of violence. Which is essentially this mindset that women are less, women are not equal, they are to be controlled, their sexuality is to be contained, their life forces are to be dampened, they are to be kept down so that men can have power. I see this mindset in every country I go to.

She goes on to call the mass protests and outrage in Delhi following the rape a “part of the rising.” And despite denigration of the protesters by Indian politicians as ‘dented and painted women’, or even more legitimate critique of how this particular rape — and not thousands of others — ignited the outrage of India’s rising elite upper middle classwhat is profoundly true about the public outrage in India is how it has awakened South Asia, the diaspora, and the world to issues of gender violence.

As Ensler so rightly says, the task now is channeling this energy and outrage into ongoing, thoughtful, and socially just work. 

One Million Moms for Gun Control - January 2013
©One Million Moms for Gun Control – January 2013

And while the situations are by no means alike, I do wonder if gun control protests in this country can equally be considered part of the worldwide “rising” for peace and social justice. And if not, how can we make them so? How can we turn the unacceptable and horrific deaths of our young people — all our young people — be it from gender violence, or the acts of a mentally ill individual with access to horrific weapons — into action, justice, and future political vision?

Perhaps these two recent tragedies have as much that differentiate them as bring them together into the light of common knowledge. But both have been devastating. And both can be awakenings.

I can’t help but go back to the words of poet Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Into that heaven of freedom, and justice, let our world — finally — awake.

Originally posted on Sayantani’s blog, Stories Are Good Medicine on January 8, 2013. Cross-posted with permission. 

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