Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. US$26.00, paper; US$26.00, ebook. ISBN 9781478019343
Based in rural Haryana, a state in northwestern India, Semiotics of Rape, examines how trajectories of the “rape script” (4) collide and converge. Borrowing from Sharon Marcus (1992) the rape script can be broadly categorized as legal (police, courts, and attorneys), social (family, kin, and villagers) and the victim herself. Despite this range, the three are “nevertheless unified in the common subject of their scrutiny” (4), that is, the plaintiff who has been sexually violated and how her subjectivity was produced. Oza intentionally makes an important distinction between sexual subjectivity and sexual agency. The latter are not rape cases; they may involve deception but do not entail sexual violence. Sexual subjectivity, on the other hand, is anchored in cases of sexual violence and requires the woman to navigate and negotiate a complex legal and social terrain. In foregrounding sexual subjectivity, Oza is exploring and examining ways in which the woman can establish autonomy of her lived experience of violence and reclaim herself neither solely as broken nor as valiant.
Sexual subjectivity has specific valence in a context like rural Haryana (not an exception) which carries a long and troubling history of sexual violence by upper caste men against Dalitwomen. The rape scripts, as Oza argues, are not discursive formation nor narratives. Instead, scripts seek a particular outcome by intentionally rendering them audible to the state as a way to mobilize for justice. Interestingly, drawing on feminist geographers, Oza work focuses on scales of social reproduction (15) as a way to embed violence with the territorial parameters of caste and gender. On one hand, we see the bureaucratic scale of boundaries, wards, taxes, etc.; on the other lies the intimate scale of the home and the body. The Dalit woman’s body occupies a specific location where two scales intersect through the register of violence.
Oza adeptly interweaves the various facets—consent, compromise, land, and death—to demonstrate the injustices that are deepened in the violation of Dalit women’s bodies. The challenges of translation emerges when marzi and shamjauta are not quite “consent” and “compromise” respectively. While these words circulated widely in the cases, the author invites us to locate them within the crafting of sexual subjectivities. A Dalit woman can withdraw a rape case or her family can compromise outside the courts; yet to see these moves simply as failures, we would miss the larger political context. Land is key to this context and Oza notes how the emergence of a neoliberal economy depleted the rural economy and shifted the significance of land vis-à-vis caste oppression. On one hand, we see the depletion of the rural economy that impacted the land-owning Jats; and on the other, the Dalits experienced a modicum of class mobility. Taken together, land simultaneously emerged as a medium for both castes to leverage power in rape cases outside the court, while rape cases against a Jatcould be dropped in exchange for land. Similarly, Jats could also leverage land to coerce the otherwise landless Dalits into dismissing cases to ensure continued agricultural work for their livelihood.
Finally, the book signals a changing terrain in the context of violence against women in India. While we do not want to valourize an origin story, the outcry over the sexual assault and murder of Jyoti Pandey, a pharmacy student in New Delhi in 2012, defied the stigma that was typically marked on the violated woman’s self and body. The decades-long feminist movement to centre then decentre the shame and stigma of rape seemed to have finally yielded results. In an act of radical defiance, the parents of Jyoti Pandey urged the media to use her name rather than the pseudonym, Nirbhaya, which it had adopted to adhere to the law but also to circumvent the stigma. We see a similar effort in the case of the assault and murder of Moumita Debnath at the R. G. Kar Medical College in Kolkata in 2024. Debnath was a junior doctor and was killed while on a night shift at the hospital. Like Pandey’s parents, Debnath’s parents spoke openly about the brutality their daughter endured. While these instances shifted the narrative of sexual assault on women delinking the stigma and the violence, serious limitations remain. As Oza’s work underscores, sexual violence against Dalit women continues to be obscured in the larger context of violence against women. Even as the mainstream media continues to raise alarm in the case of Jyoti Pandey and Moumita Debnath, there is resounding silence when women of oppressed castes are violated. Therefore, Oza’s emphasis on sexual subjectivity is not simply an analytic position but a call for re-envisioning what sexual assault means to a marginalized woman who like others, would also want to reclaim her subjectivity in defiance of sheer victimhood.
Simanti Dasgupta
University of Dayton, Dayton