Guest Post by RINA RAMDEV AND DEBADITYA BHATTACHARYA

For daring to elope and marry outside the dictates of caste-community honour codes, a young Delhi University undergraduate came to a brutal death at the hands of her family. The incident since then has become part of public discourse, thanks to our newspaper-educated sensibilities. But the ‘popular’ set of responses that this event has generated from our newsreaderly selves is worth some reviewing. While there has been a large-scale condemnation of this incident from ‘civilized’ quarters of the media-enlightened, the most commonly employed terms of this debate have veered around an imagination of a ‘civilizational modernity’ versus an ‘aggressive-savage primitivism’. Are we still in the Dark Ages, most have asked. Is not ‘love marriage’ a civilizational mandate of the age of the modern, others have comfortably posed and then gone on to conclude that the fact that we – as a ‘society’, metropolitan-converts in this case – have not yet made our peace with a civil code of morality relegates us to a ‘rustic-primitive mindset’. The muse of Indian judicial processes and imaginations of penal justice – ah! the “collective conscience” – has spoken thus and gone back to catching up on Ramzaadas and terror attacks on national ‘honour’. And just while we were conveniently conceding to the relative insignificance of an undergraduate girl’s ‘honour’ compared to the prime-time rhetorical spectres of ‘national honour’ in Jammu & Kashmir, a leading English daily attempted to bring back a few ‘dark’ images from Bhawna Yadav’s past. 

Titled ‘The story of a DU student who allegedly was killed by her parents’, and published in The Indian Express edition of December 7, we find a disturbingly skewed telling. First of all, in its desire to probe the ‘story’ behind Bhawna’s death, the Express piece foists a causal connection between the girl’s conscious choices or decisions and a ‘psychology’ of honour killing. These ‘choices’ (of bunking classes to meet her boyfriend, of failing exams, of disobeying her parents’ injunctions, of eloping and getting married), in simplistically being viewed as the direct immediate ‘cause’ of her murder, can easily translate into ‘responsibility’ for the crime.

Honour – as we understand it – is merely a fragile perception of self-worth the assertion of which lies precisely in moments of its violation or fragility. So, even if the girl in question had married into a family of her uncle’s choice and then spoken out against domestic violence at her in-laws’, her acts would have brought equal disgrace to that spectral ‘honour’ that she was killed for. And her ‘fate’ would have surely been no different. The reporters’ attempt in this piece to causally explain a criminal violence through its relationship with the victim’s conscious choices preceding it comes close to not only faulting the latter for her fate but also underplays the excesses of a sanctified order of ‘honour’.

Furthermore, in what seems like a deliberate reading of these ‘choices’ within a moral economy of ‘un-success’ or ‘failure’, the piece performs the classic patriarchal displacement of ‘guilt’ from the criminal to the victim. Structured as a shocking indictment, it plainly chronicles as it were, a death foretold. The young girl’s last few years are clearly inserted within the pragmatics of a moral profiling project that is often made the investigative logic around instances of rape and sexual violence against women. It routinely cites the victim’s wilful ‘wantonness’ and her separation from socially sanctioned behavioural codes as almost inviting and legitimizing retaliatory forms of violence.

Bhawna’s attendance record (a dismal 18.3%, we are told) is cited to absolve the teacher-college duo of responsibility towards an errant student. Not only that, there’s an elaborate saga woven around her apparent ‘insignificance’ among and ‘lack of affective investment’ in classmates and teachers. No one really ‘perceives’ her loss in college. Because, as one unnamed classmate would say, she “almost never came to class” and could occasionally be spotted around in the college canteen “clicking pictures…or sharing snacks” with her boyfriend. The ways in which the institutional space directs a strange moral ‘gaze’ at the every ‘other’, and the classroom feeds into an ideological project of the patriarchal imagination of ‘character’ become disturbingly manifest here. That the criminal murder of a student fails to mobilize even a single member from her immediate academic fraternity to join a candle-light vigil in her memory (other than a lone teacher from another department that the article cites) is, more than an evidence of the former’s affective disconnect with friends-teachers, a clear proof of the increasing ethical redundancy of academic communities. The report however uses these examples only to urge us to measure the degree of Bhawna’s alienation, and thus tries to manipulate our response to the event of crime by calling into question the victim’s popularly-testified ‘moral character’. As one ‘senior faculty’ from Bhawna’s department reminisces, by way of a disaffected prophesy:

I kept telling her to be regular, letters were also sent to her parents. We dedicate the first 10 minutes of every lecture on morality; in the final year, her class was studying the Bhagwad Gita — who knows if she had spent more time in college, maybe things would have turned out different….

While this kind of a ‘character certificate’ issued by the institution seems at bottom an attempt to save its own ‘honour’ and image, the political insensitivity in it is appalling. In disavowing of its burden of accountability, the teacher-guardian begins by branding the victim as lacking in ‘morality’ and ironically implicates the institution further as a potentially indoctrinating force. In her prediction of a ‘different’ fate for a class-attending Gita-reading Sita in Bhawna, the ‘senior faculty’ diagnoses the cause of her tragedy in her own hamartia. The victim by now is fully criminalized to have deserved what she got, and her killing therefore was more a punishment than ‘crime’. Of course, one wouldn’t have anything against the reading of Bhagwad Gita as part of a Sanskrit Hons. syllabus, but to use the text as a moral parable to guard the ‘honour’ of families and institutions (and of course, society’s!) is precariously close to the Hindu Right agenda and its current attempts at academic overhaul.

Second, the moral polemics in the article perform easy identifications at every step – for example, an uncritical aligning of student truancy within the classroom space with other defections like having a boyfriend. It reductively recalls Bhawna only as “Roll no. 2” and “the girl with the boyfriend”. Bhawna’s own aspirational attempts within stifling strictures are narrated to position her enterprise and industriousness at stitching and tailoring trendy outfits (and later also her own wedding lehenga) as taking away from the academic focus that should typically define student life. It is the same desire that the article pins in her decision to choose ‘College’ over ‘Course’.

She completed her class 12th from Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyala in Kakrola, scoring 60 per cent in her boards, a chirpy teenager who sat in the front row and who, despite being an average student, was never tardy. She rarely missed classes and would forever stress on the importance of getting into a good college. Getting admission in the prestigious South Campus college was a dream come true for her. [I]t was not the course, but the college which mattered to her….

The ‘fall’ of Bhawna from a front-bencher and regular school-goer to “leaving college by midday” to meet her boyfriend and missing morality lessons is positioned through ‘choices’ that will ultimately play themselves out treacherously later. This is where her first decided assault on ‘honour’ lies. And interestingly, it is implied that she begins by not merely falling from the ‘honour’ of her family or community or caste, but the ‘honour’ of a woman. Clearly her family looks at her college education only as an added qualification for marriage within which academic excellence holds little crucial significance with them having already zeroed in on a match for her.  The Express piece performs an alarmingly dubious connection, by discerning in Bhawna’s story a prior event of moral corruption which was only aggravated by her later disrespect for family traditions at a cousin’s wedding.

A visit to Alwar to attend a cousin’s wedding left her incensed. “She ranted about how her cousin had to wear a ghunghat all the time, and was not allowed to sit down in front of her in-laws or eat till the other family members had finished their meal. I calmed her down after a lot of effort and with a cup of cappuccino made the way she liked,” says Abhishek.

In this, Bhawna’s story is made to replicate the ‘tragic’ pattern of a girl’s self-willed hubris as leading to her nemesis in Death – or, a suitable Bildungsroman of her chronologically mapped descent from girl-hood to student-hood to girlfriend-hood to victim-hood. It does ring in a melodramatic dose of pathos at the end, but tries hard enough through the rest of the ‘story’ to alienate our sympathies from the protagonist who wilfully compromised both career and family for love. Alternatively, it features as a cautionary tale for ‘girlfriends’ with violent niece-beating uncles to honour the cause of ‘honour’ and not rewrite such stories.

Third, the use of the word ‘allegedly’ in the title of the piece (while there is fairly conclusive evidence of her parents’ involvement in the killing) makes its politics even more suspect. Choosing to shift focus from the details of the crime to the prehistory of the victim, the piece begins by repeatedly referring to the crime as an ‘allegation’ to be weighed against Bhawna’s own tendencies and predilections. One cannot miss the suspicion implicit in the titular claim to truth in Bhawna’s “story” when pitted beside her “alleged” killing.

Fourth and most important, the authors of this piece interestingly replay the crucial moral parable of ‘tradition versus modernity’ around the figure of the woman that we began with. In its essence, Bhawna’s love ‘story’ is interpreted as a tussle between the opposing forces of a repressive-despotic tradition that protects and a liberating modernity that corrupts.

“[T]heir relationship was a classic case of opposites hitting it off really well. He encouraged her to experiment with her looks and introduced her to different cuisines. Soon, Bhawna would take to stitching clothes and try her hand at cooking unfamiliar dishes like pasta at home. “She used to be surprised initially by my relationship with my parents and how they knew about my past girlfriends. Slowly, I think, I became a mirror of the life she wanted to have,” says Abhishek, sitting in his residence in Hastsal near Vikaspuri in west Delhi.”

Between “stitching clothes” and “cooking pasta”, “pigtails” and “straight black hair”, “comfort fit colourful salwar kameezes” and ‘skinny jeans, shirts and dresses in pinks, whites and blacks”, Bhawna is imagined as the price that one pays for ‘changing’ in a “cool way”. Following her affair with Abhishek and “a glimpse into a life she had never known”, Bhawna of course starts “travelling on her own” and “giving tuitions to earn pocket money” but only to be “glued to her phone” in college while bunking classes regularly. The promise of emancipation that a new life brought to her, the piece argues, was only to be realised [read: wasted] in “cappuccinos made the way she liked” and “going for a movie in the evening” and “having dinner out” and consequently, fast-dropping grades and “a less than 40 per cent in her first and second year exams”. This kind of a moral dichotomization of the relative costs of modernity and tradition finally end up advocating for an ‘honour’ that patriarchal tyranny guarantees in exchange of morality lessons and good grades.

It’s about time we learn that every such ‘honour’-keeping involves as much violence as an ‘honour-killing’. And even as Bhawna is not the first victim at the altar of ‘honour’, in her killing we also need to recognise our de facto collusions that are closing in alarmingly. The distant discomfort relayed from the village/small town ‘khap’ and its diktats against women, caste and community, is no longer being played out only in spectral deferrals. It is rather dangerously kept alive, aided and abetted by liberal bulwarks like the media and institutions of learning. And the more we learn to live with it, the more we kill the desire and demand for a “bekhaauf azaadi”. The “Dark Age” that our collective conscience rants at is here and now, and the time of modernity was never exempt from it.

Rina Ramdev and Debaditya Bhattacharya teach at Venkateswara College, Delhi University, where Bhawna was a Sanskrit (Honours) student.