Anitya Sanket
Intimate partner violence (IPV) gained widespread attention during the COVID-19 lockdowns and has continued to feature prominently in public discourse. Mass layoffs, precarious and uncertain working conditions, and poor social security policies were shown to strongly correlate with increased instances of IPV during the pandemic and its aftermath. While the COVID-19 crisis should have catalysed a fundamental critique of capitalist social relations and inspired an engagement with materialist frameworks for understanding gender oppression, instead, as lockdowns lifted, the ruling class successfully redirected popular discontent toward reactionary channels. As the immediate health crisis subsided, the dominant discourse effectively shifted in favour of the ruling classes, evidenced by the growing popularity of global conservatism, marked by economic nationalism that serves corporate interests, anti-immigration rhetoric and media-induced mass panic. In addition to the anti-labour union legislations justified by the need for economic recovery, fueling increased authoritarianism due to ongoing ‘emergencies’, all of this came at the cost of a potential class consciousness and served to strain the existing ruptures in social relations collectively.
An example of how the ruling classes use diversionary tactics to take any discussion away from how material conditions produce extreme social breakdowns is the treatment of IPV and its superficial coverage by the Indian mainstream media. A nuanced discussion on how IPV is deeply rooted in caste influenced socio-economic and culturally skewed and unequal gender relations is virtually absent. Rather than taking up any of these issues, the discourse has steered toward reactionary and divisive rhetoric on cultural decay, individual pathology, ‘predatory wives’, and ‘misuse’ of socially progressive laws. Even progressive responses that attribute such violence simply to ‘patriarchy induced toxic masculinity’ fail to engage with the specific material contradictions of the caste-economy that systematically reproduce women’s economic vulnerability and social isolation.
The sensational media coverage of crimes against husbands by their wives does warrant a structural understanding of the nature of marriage. In the broadest terms, marriage is a socially unifying institution intended to bring stability to individuals’ lives. However, historically, marriage has served a peculiar purpose in the South Asian region, which is to maintain the caste-economy and reproduce social hierarchies. What should be of import is that marriage, besides serving as an enduring institution that can help individuals pass through the vagaries of life, has also been used as a tool by ruling elites to effectively maintain a social order that is characterized by an inequitable caste hierarchy that favours the socio-political and economic interests of a few at the expense of a majority.
Caste and erasure of women’s labour power – As the social fabric of the South-Asian region is deeply intertwined with caste-economy and capitalist hierarchies, the institution of marriage that sustains a household is informed by caste. A vivid account of how marriage sustains the caste economy is succinctly captured by Dr. Ambedkar, who explained that ‘caste’ cannot exist as a singular entity. That is to say that there can always be ‘castes’ and never ‘a caste’ in a social sense. Each caste exists in relation to other castes and is always in a historical process of competing with other ‘castes’ for resources and political patronage, thus producing a dynamic relationship characterized by constantly changing social statuses, maintaining relative purity with other castes, and forging different ruling-caste alliances.
Marriage, household, and caste remain crucial in enabling the economy to extract both paid and unpaid labour of women. Women’s labour power that keeps the economy functional is simultaneously rendered invisible and kept outside the wage economy. In other words, by relegating labour power to a mere ‘duty’ or ‘responsibility’, unpaid domestic labour subsidizes the economy without the capital and state having to cover the costs of maintaining a labour force. When the workers’ housing, food, childcare, and eldercare, for instance, is outsourced primarily to women (family) without compensation, it not only saves the capital from skyrocketing labour maintenance costs but also reproduces material conditions necessary to produce unequal gender and labour relations, which, when stretched to breaking point, can give rise to violent acts, as expressions of resistance, breakdown, or retaliation within a structure that offers no economic autonomy or exit.
As Dr. Ambedkar explains the phenomenon of how castes come to reproduce conditions necessary for its survival by saying that each caste fulfils the criteria of being called a ‘nation’, famously leading him to define caste as an “enclosed class” and call the region as consisting of several nations. For the survival of castes, as he points out, control over women’s autonomy and sexual agency became the only way for a smooth passing down of property and maintaining relative ‘purity’ of a caste in relation to other castes. As a consequence, it necessitated the strict adherence to endogamy and the notion of purity. This was partly done by eliminating the problem of “surplus women”’ (the women who were seen as ‘leftover’ and needing to be eliminated as men from the same caste diminish in numbers due to several factors, such as wars, etc.) through means like Sati, desexualization of widows, and rigid control on women’s social assimilation. This so-called problem of “surplus women”, which once marriage effectively solved, finds no easy solution in the times we live in, where assimilation, women’s entry into wage labour, and inter-caste contact are impossible to avoid. Despite rigid familial control and caste policing, the prospects of women freely choosing their partners and thus threatening carefully planned caste alliances, business networks, and property consolidations remain a potent challenge to the smooth functioning of the caste economy.
Economics of Marriage – The husband and wife in a marriage are not seen as friends in a caste society but as agents who cohabitate to fulfil their duty to get married within their own caste, and to not bring shame upon their caste by straying away to castes lower than theirs. What necessarily follows is the Dharma (duty) to marry off a daughter to a suitable man of one’s own caste. Marriage and sexual exclusivity in a caste society are not out of religious and social obligations, but rather as tools to maintain unequal labour relations, relative purity, and caste hierarchies. They serve a dual functional purpose of discouraging assimilation and kinship with other castes, and promote a feeling of oneness within the same caste. What remains at the core of a caste society, however, is that participants in a marriage are also economic agents, where the husband gets exclusive access to the wife’s reproductive and sexual labour, while the wife gains access to some economic security. What superficially appears as a robust and natural order is quickly dysfunctional when the economics of caste is taken to its logical end.
Is Caste Economy divorced from IPV? – If marriage is fundamentally about property relations, maintenance of purity, and reproduction of socio-cultural-caste capital, then wives who are discontented with their family-arranged-husbands resorting to heinous crimes against their husbands are not acting outside the twisted logic of this system. What might seem on the surface like an aberration when we hear news of wives committing crimes against husbands for their property is rather, an alternative strategy within the same economic logic. Thus, a woman poisoning her husband for his property engages in the same kind of economic calculation as the family that arranges her marriage for dowry, or throws outlandishly fancy weddings as a way to display socio-cultural capital, simply eliminating the intermediate step of lifetime dependency before she finally inherits it.
Capitalist development, which commodifies intimate relationships through matrimonial markets, commercializes wedding ceremonies, and contributes to dowry inflation, has made marriage an increasingly costly business transaction where elaborate cost-benefit analyses are conducted before arrangements. The question is, can fancy weddings hide the ugliness of a marriage that is either performed out of tacit family pressure or where there is serious confusion over the whats and whys of marriage? The ‘killing for love’ has always been a hallmark of a caste society which infests South-Asian communities across religions. The men kill their daughters and sisters out of ‘love for their family honour’, and the women kill for their men to save themselves from being condemned to a life chosen for them by their families out of ‘love’.
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Anitya Sanket is a Mumbai-based lawyer
