KINDLE
TM
INDIA
Ideas
Imagination
Dialectics
February 2013
www.kindlemag.in 1st February 2013 `30
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hile the infamous Delhi gang rape is still fresh on the nation’s conscience, a senior Congress leader of Assam who had allegedly raped a woman in lower Assam’s Chirang district was thrashed by angry villagers, before being handed over to the police. Bikram Singh Brahma, who is the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts’ (BTAD’s) Congress Co-ordination Committee president, was allegedly caught by the family members of the woman while he reportedly tried to rape the woman. To bust stereotypes about women of the region being empowered and liberated, there are many communities where women are treated as ‘mere commodities’. Most of the tribes of Northeast India adhere to age-old customary laws instead of the statutory laws in matters of matrimony, inheritance and divorce. The unwritten tribal laws are usually recognised as binding by their communities. A customary law can be defined as a traditional common rule or practice that has become an intrinsic part of the accepted and expected conduct in a community, profession, or trade and is treated as a legal requirement. Most tribes consider their customary laws intrinsic to their identity though most of them are rooted in patriarchy. “A rotten fence and an old wife can be changed anytime,” is a common proverb in Mizoram. Under the existing customary laws, when a man divorces his wife, the latter leaves the house without virtually anything, even if she contributed a lot to the family’s assets. However, things are gradually changing with the Mizo Divorce Ordinance 2008 which will put an end to certain divorce laws under the “male-friendly” Mizo Customary Law which are highly anti-women.
SHADOW LINES
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Illustration by Sumit Das
Teresa Rehman breaks some myths about women friendly communities of the Northeast.
On Balance She was the ďŹ rst Chief Justice of a state High Court. From those days to now, has the male gaze changed? In an interview with Shubham Nag during the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, Leila Seth talks about the judiciary, men, women and of course, the Preamble.
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Cover Story by: Sayan Bhattacharya Poornima Joshi Saswat Pattanayak
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D my sexiness upset you? Does Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?? - Maya Angelou
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OPINION
February 2013
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Illustration by Soumik Lahiri
RAPE IN WONDERLAND: NOT ANOTHER FAIRYTALE Amid all the heat and dust around rape, looking for all that passes off innocuously as revolutionary or customary and yet there are only more holes to be punched…By Sayan Bhattacharya.
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“… I am an emotional creature; things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-shaped ideas. They pulse through my organs and legs. And burn up my ears… There is a particular way of knowing. It’s like the older women somehow forgot. I rejoice that it’s still in my body… I know that lipstick means more than show. I know that boys feel super-insecure And so-called terrorists are made, not born. I know that one kiss can take away all my decision-making ability. And sometimes, you know, it should. This is not extreme. It’s a girl thing. What we would all be If the big door inside us flew open. Don’t tell me not to cry. To calm it down. Not to be so extreme. To be reasonable. I am an emotional creature. It’s how the earth got made. How the wind continues to pollinate. You don’t tell the Atlantic Ocean, to behave…” - Eve Ensler in I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World
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SEIZE THE NIGHT
For those who are dismissing the protests on the streets of Delhi, they are far off the mark. India stands at a crux. Why? Answers Poornima Joshi.
Illustration by Soumik Lahiri
Our Rape, Their Rape By Saswat Pattanayak
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he need is to change the entire language of rape. Not to just call it a rape, but as rape by men. Not simply that a Dalit woman was raped, but a Dalit woman was raped by a Hindu upper-caste man. Not just a woman was gang-raped, but six men raped a woman one by one by one by one by one by one. Not just Violence Against Women (VAW), but Violence
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Against Women By Men (VAWBM). Not just laws around gender discrimination or sexism, but specifically around men discriminating against women or laws to hold male sexists accountable. Not just a survivor or a victim, but a woman victim of a crime committed by men. Sure, it will upset the traditional editing style sheets, and the brevity would be a casualty, but there are far greater casualties in the process when
THE ALMIGHTY’S NEMESIS
From 1989 to 2012, this nation was dreaming. Now, it’s time to wake up... Feels Shubham Nag.
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ike Muhammad Ali was to boxing, Tiger Woods to golf, or Jordan to basketball, he was the face of cricket. An icon that transcended the boundaries of nationality and redefined cricketing longevity. In only the fourth Test of his life, he was struck on the nose. Blood gushed out, but he refused to leave the field. He went on to score 57. A dream had been born, of talent and aspiration. He was our aspiration, our dream and thus, we never had the stomach and the guts to accept a failing Sachin Tendulkar. For all of us, who were growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, Tendulkar is what we wanted to be. When every household craved for an engineer (or a doctor), we imagined ourselves adjusting that vital guard, smiling at the bowler running in from the other end, and soaking in all the tension in the atmosphere. It was never a question whether he could digest the occasional failure or not, because we couldn’t. We could not imagine ourselves not being Tendulkar. Over the last year, we kept pushing him to the edge before ultimately, he called it quits. That is because we could not dare to see him (ourselves) fail one more time. Holding him tight in their minds, a nation dreamt through 23 years, dreamt through repeated failures, through sneaking success, through tensions, through riots, floods, droughts, through massacres, through festivities… dreamt in stadiums, in streets, in offices, in toilets, in front of the
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television sets. A nation dreamt every morning, for 23 years. And then one day, they were woken up. The Superhero couldn’t go on and on, he gave up, revealed that he too was a mere mortal. It is we who turned Sachin, the cricketing genius into Tendulkar, the God of Cricket. Deification is rooted deep in the collective Indian psyche. But when our Gods do not respond to our petitions, we take to vengeance. How dare he fail when we have pinned all our hopes and aspirations upon him for over two decades, bought MRF bats and drank only a certain cola? How could his failure coincide with the team moving downhill? Vengeance boiled within us, stones turned into bricks as we successfully assassinated our self-created God. Apart from the magnificent batsman and the sporting legend that he is, history will also remember Sachin Tendulkar for being the perfect example of how deification destroys gods. As rude and ungrateful as it may sound, but I believe that Tendulkar’s partial retirement marks the necessary end to a necessary phenomenon. Sachin’s decision to hang his boots should serve as reminder to all of us to stop immortalisation of humans, stop dreaming about not having to face the inevitable. The deification of Sachin Tendulkar has turned him into a full-fledged industry, with many careers, thousands of
CATTLE CAMP by Arko Datto
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his series is a photographic exploration of the Night through various physical spaces that I have been a part of and experienced.
I have been in awe of the Night and the myriad hues that it presents itself in. I strive in my images to seek sense out of life that exists within the layered folds of that darkness. This is an effort to capture what the Night means for me as well as for others who are in direct and often brutal confrontation with the Night. The first in this serie is Nighttime Cattle Camp, which is a documentative exploration of a Refugee Camp in drought-stricken Maharashtra.
Maharashtra experienced one of its worst droughts this year. The districts of Thane, Satara and Vidarbha were among the worst hit. Promised aid and relief from the Government hardly found their way to the common man, lost in the many tiers of bureaucracy that have been put in place. Many have been forced to migrate to the cities of Pune and Maharashtra. Yet, from a despondent portrayal of continued neglect from the officials, there arose a picture of resilience in the face of such insurmountable adversity.
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P H O T O
E S S AY
February 2013
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RNI NO. WBENG/2010/36111 Regd. No. KOL RMS/429/2011-2013
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