Cold SnapDragon

A light read by me about the person who became India's first woman lawyer over at  dailyo.in : Cornelia Sorabji is, of course, best-known as India’s first woman lawyer, after having been the first woman graduate of Bombay University and the first woman to study law at Oxford University. It is easy to co-opt her into the role of a committed feminist who changed women’s lives but to do so would likely be to essentialise her life, flatten the many layers of her personality, and possibly to impose on her philosophies which she would not immediately have claimed as her own. Read more. 2017 tweets: India's first woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabji, born #otd 1866, didn't have an easy start despite being privileged but that didn't stop her.  She managed to begin practising not as a lawyer permitted to but as a "person for the defence", thus exploiting a legal loophole. pic.twitter.com/iSQ6S61Zdf — Nandita Saikia (@nsaikia) November 15, 2017 Unsurpris...

What I understood of the Court's discussion of consent in its acquittal of Mahmood Farooqui for rape made me very uncomfortable. I've talked about why that was the case in two pieces, links to which I've shared here: Asia Times :  Mahmood Farooqui :  HC's  Troubling Interpretation of Consent  & Scroll :  No may not mean no: Order acquitting Peepli Live co-director of rape opens terrifying possibilities

The decision of the Bombay High Court in the case of High Court On Its Own Motion vs The State Of Maharashtra decided on 19 September, 2016, has been widely spoken of as a progressive decision, and in many ways it is although it does also leave some questions unanswered. Para14. reads: "A woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy is not a frivolous one. Abortion is often the only way out of a very difficult situation for a woman. An abortion is a carefully considered decision taken by a woman who fears that the welfare of the child she already has, and of other members of the household that [sic] she is obliged to care for with limited financial and other resources, may be compromised by the birth of another child. These are decisions taken by responsible women who have few other options. They are women who would ideally have preferred to prevent an unwanted pregnancy, but were unable to do so. If a woman does not want to continue with the pregnancy, then forcing her to do so...

The law does recognise marital rape. The concern is that the law does not adequately recognise marital rape as a crime. Under civil law, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, recognises sexual abuse as a form of domestic violence and, consequently, it recognises marital rape as a legal wrong, Under criminal law, the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (last amended in 2013), recognises the possibility of a man raping his wife only to promptly clarify that such rape within a marriage would not generally be considered to be rape for the purposes of Section 375 of the IPC which defines the offence of rape. ‘Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape’ reads the second exception to Section 375 of the IPC. In essence, a wife who is not under 15 cannot be raped as far as this Section is concerned. If the IPC Section were to be read in conjunction with the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012...

Just how are the stats specifying the percentage of alleged misuse of 498A, IPC, being derived?! In support of proposals to amend Section 498A, there seem to be stats doing the rounds of the number and percentage of supposedly false cases. Some time ago, ToI published a table in an article claiming that 10% of dowry cases are false. The table was attributed to NCRB, and the same figures seem to have appeared in  another piece , this time attributed to a 'senior official'. The Asian Age, too, published  a piece  against the proposed amendment of 'dowry law', stating that the Union Minister of State for home Haribhai Chaudhary had cited the same figures in the Lok Sabha although this statement doesn't appear to find mention in the  uncorrected Lok Sabha debates of the day . The piece in the Asian Age pointed out that there's no mention of what the stats are based on; if they're based on acquittals, they mistakenly equate an acquittal with proof of the relevan...

On facing abuse This post is personal in nature, it focuses on domestic violence although it is not limited to domestic violence, and it describes what I've learnt of violence (mainly in relation to myself with reference to my class). It is by no means intended to speak for every woman, neither am I anywhere near certain that I've got it right. I've used the term 'abusive situation' as opposed to 'abusive relationship' simply because public discourse (in India) relating to domestic violence is largely limited to domestic violence perpetrated against wives by husbands and in-laws, almost completely ignoring other forms of domestic violence (including that perpetrated by natal families). I've also written of episodes of domestic violence earlier ( here )  in a post which isn't an accurate depiction of events. I I woke up from dream feeling happier than I had for a long time. I’d dreamt of a rape. Not mine. A rapist who was caught — I shot a gun at the...

(I began writing this post thinking of the portrayals of NE women by others... its scope unsurprisingly expanded in minutes.) Take racial insensitivity. Add to it the entitlement of the upper class and, treatment in real life aside, you have all the makings of the image of the Hottentot Venus of contemporary times in far too many portrayals of the figure of the marginalised woman. The Hottentot Venus was a person transformed into an object; she was born in South Africa in 1789, brought to England in 1810, and then exhibited on stage and in cages till her death in 1815. We know what she was turned into but we have no idea who she was. We often call her, when we deign to accord her any humanity, ‘Sarah Baartman’; of her given name, we can only guess. We believe ‘Ssehura’ may have been closest to it but can’t be sure. ‘Baartman’ or some variant may have been imposed on her upon being baptised in England in 1811. The appellation ‘Venus’ has never indicated anything but distorted nineteenth...