[khan]

III. Objectification

The identification of the female body with the nation takes us some way into the grim darkness of Gujarat, but questions remain. If woman symbolizes nation, why are women brutally and sadistically tortured rather than abducted and impregnated? To be sure, many people were murdered at partition, and in the general violence many women were used simply as objects of the desire to maim and kill. On the other hand, the logic of colonial possession was also amply evident in that case, since men really did want to take these women to their country and force them to bear their children. And in large numbers, they did so. In Gujarat, we hear nothing of this sort. Women were simply tortured and killed. So we wonder how the idea of woman as symbol of nation and national rule could possibly lend itself to this particular type of violence, what the connection can possibly be between seeing a woman as a symbol of what one loves and honors and seeing her as an object that one can break up, with indifference to her pain. Shouldn’t we say that it’s only to the extent that men had lost the connection between woman and nation that they were able to treat women in this hideous way, not even permitting the survival of the body itself, but first torturing it and then, usually, burning it to cinders?

In short, how can one maim, burn, and torture the venerated body of the nation?

The feminist concept of “objectification” provides essential insight here.11 Objectification is treating as a mere thing what is really not a thing. It has multiple aspects, including the denial of autonomy and subjectivity and the ideas of ownership, fungibility (one is just like the others), and violability (it’s all right to break the thing up or abuse it). Not all forms of objectification possess all these features: for example, one may treat a fine painting as an object, thus denying it autonomy and subjectivity, without holding it to be fungible with other paintings and without holding that it is all right to break it up. In the domain of human relations, however, sinister connections begin to be woven among these different aspects. At the heart of all of them, I would argue, is the idea of instrumentality: a thing, unlike a person, is an instrument or means to the ends of persons; it is not an end in itself. The objectification of women is primarily a denial that women are ends in themselves. It is because one has already made that denial, at some level of one’s awareness, that it becomes so easy to deny women autonomy, to deny that their subjective experience matters, and, even, to begin to ignore qualitative differences between one and another, as pornography so easily does.

What is relevant here is that the logic of instrumentality also leads powerfully in the direction of seeing women as violable. What you have already conceived of as a mere tool of your own ends, not an end in herself, can so easily be understood as something that you may beat, abuse, burn, even break up at will: it is yours to use, and to abuse. Even a precious painting has legal rights against such abuses only in virtue of its connection with a human maker: the “moral rights” of artworks under contemporary European law are not rights of the painting as such, but rights of the artist in the painting. So too, once women are understood as mere instruments of men’s desires (for power, for pleasure), there would seem to be no principled limit on the ways one might use them. A means is a means to an end.

To bring these points back to the case of India: treating women as the nation, while apparently honorific, is already a form of objectification, and, particularly, of instrumentalization. Under colonialism, a nation is a ground on which men may gratify their desires for control and honor. By being exalted into a symbol of nationhood, a woman is at the same time reduced—from being a person who is an end, an autonomous subject, someone whose feelings count, into being a mere ground for the expression of male desire. Thus, although much of the time the male who sees a woman that way will still want her to live and eat and bear children, there is no principled barrier to his using her brutally if that is what suits his desires. We see that connection already in the grim tales of domestic violence narrated by Sarkar.

And we see it clearly, I believe, in Gujarat. Muslim female bodies symbolize a recalcitrant part of the nation, one as yet undominated by Hindu male power. One reaction to that situation might have been to abduct the woman and to place her in one’s own household. But if women are things, instruments, objects, then their bodies may also be used in gruesome ways—if that is what will best satisfy one’s desires for power, honor, and security. Once the status of end-in-itself is denied, everything else follows on a whim.

In short, it is not simply because the logic of the domestic sphere became the logic of kingly rule, but because of the particular form this kingly rule took, involving the conception of women as means rather than ends, that nation-worship can so easily segue into woman-killing. Other forms of kingly rule—for example, most parents’ relations toward their very young children—do not involve instrumentalization, and do not lead to violence of the sort we see in Gujarat. But the particular way in which kingly rule over women made them into a symbol of nationhood involved instrumentalization. So the woman was reduced from a person to a mere symbol, and that symbol, however apparently honorific, was a mere tool of male ends. The road from that point to violation is short and relatively direct.