The Telegraph
February 15, 2007
Boro Chupria is a small village about 25 km from
Krishnagar. It is a pretty village, with its huts
of mud, brick and darma, and its grounds are
clean. Things look peaceful - and unspoilt. There
are no blatant signs of the world outside: only a
large haath chhap, the Congress symbol, is drawn
on the outside of a hut. Yet this prosperous
jute-producing village sends a large section of
its men to the Gulf countries.
On December 25, newspapers had reported an
incident concerning a young woman from Boro
Chupria. She was dragged to Gyanrapota, the
village across the main road, stripped, beaten,
tonsured and photographed naked because she
behaved “like a boy”. The reports suggested that
the villagers thought of her as a lesbian. But
since spoken Bengali has no equivalent for the
English word - samakami not being used in
everyday speech - being “like a boy” was perhaps
the phrase being used to denote lesbianism.
Mamata Biswas (name changed) was beaten up for
allegedly “preying on” another young, but
married, girl, who lived in a nearby village.
Mamata lived in a run-down brick hut, which stood
out from the rest of the houses. As we, a team of
reporters, approached her house a week after the
incident, an assertive woman in her late 30s came
out. She was Mamata’s mother. Mamata, a small,
thin girl, dark and very hirsute, with a tonsured
head, came out too. She looked stunned by what
had happened. She was wearing just a kurta
without the salwar. Her mother said she was 16,
but she looked about 12. She looked like a boy in
girls’ clothes, and stood stiffly, with her head
bowed. But her jaws were set when she looked up.
She spoke with deliberation.
She said that five days ago, on December 22,
Ramakrishna Moitra, a resident of Gyanrapota
village, descended on her house and forcibly took
her to his house in Gyanrapota. There he, his
mother-in-law Kusum and another person called
Tarak beat her, tonsured her, stripped her and
then photographed her naked, to show the world
that biologically “she was not a girl”. Tarak,
the alleged photographer, did not develop the
film, presumably because he was disappointed.
Next day, Ramakrishna was arrested after Mamata’s
mother lodged a complaint against him, Tarak and
Kusum at Hanskhali police station. However,
Mamata, who had stated before the magistrate
after the incident that Tarak had photographed
her, has told the investigating officer that she
cannot identify the man who photographed her.
Ramakrishna has not been granted bail.
Mamata said that she was not "like a boy in any
way". She said the girl with whom she was
allegedly having an affair was just a friend, who
was being tortured by her in-laws and would ask
Mamata to visit her. Her mother said the same and
removed Mamata’s kurta to show her badly bruised
back. "How will I get such a scarred girl
married?" she asked angrily. At this point,
Mamata lost her self-control and broke into sobs.
"Aamar life-tai noshto kore diyechhe ora [They
have just destroyed my life]," she cried between
sobs and ran inside her house. By this time, a
crowd of villagers had collected around the
house. “Yes, she looks like a boy,” an old man
said. "She had short hair and wore pants. She
also rides a bicycle and most of her friends are
boys. But we all know she is a girl." We asked
her if she had offended any one with her
behaviour previously. At this, the man made a
most startling statement: "There was no such
incident before, but she was arrested on a murder
charge,“said the old man.”A boy from the
village was killed three years ago and she was
accused of the murder."
We went back to Mamata’s house. Her mother was
reluctant to speak, but said that Mamata had been
picked up by the police after a neighbour’s
ten-year-son was killed. She added that Mamata
had served two terms at the Behrampore and Liluah
correction homes for women and children, but was
later released on bail. She said she didn’t know
why her daughter was picked up for the murder,
but said Mamata was friendly with the dead boy’s
sister.
We met Mamata again. She said she was innocent of
the murder and of any liaison with the other
girl, whose father had beaten her up. But when we
asked her if the other girl also thought of her
as another girl, Mamata said her friend had
written her a letter “as a boy”, to which, she
replied “as a boy”. "But I want to marry now. It
is the duty of every girl to marry.“This time, too, a crowd had collected.”You can’t
leave without speaking to us," a man said. He
made us sit in the courtyard of a nearby house
and asked a couple, an old, frail man and his
middle-aged wife, to come forward. The woman was
holding a framed photograph to her breast, which
showed the couple with a good-looking boy. "See
this photograph! That girl, Murderer Mamata,
killed this boy!“screamed one man.”She is a
’homo-sex’!" shouted another. The girl, who was
assumed to have been victimized because of her
deviant sexuality, was being charged with murder.
The parents of the dead boy began to tell their
story. The woman could barely speak: "Tanmoy was
our only son, born after four daughters," said
Santosh Dhali, the village homeopath, "Mamata
killed him because she had a physical relation
with my youngest daughter."
Dhali said he was sleeping outside his house one
night, but was woken by a noise. Mamata was
staying over, as she often did, with his youngest
daughter. When he entered the room, he saw the
two girls in a “sexual” position. Next morning he
told his daughter, now married and living in a
neighbouring village, to end the relationship. He
stopped Mamata from entering his house. That
enraged her into threatening and beating up his
other daughters. On September 12, 2003, the day
the boy went missing, Mamata had apparently
trailed the boy the whole day, at the end of
which they were seen disappearing into the
fields. His body was discovered from a pond on
September 15. He had been strangled with jute
fibre. Dhali’s FIR alleged that Mamata had killed
Tanmoy, the go-between for Mamata and his
daughter. Dhali had found that out and asked
Tanmoy to stop arranging meetings between the two
girls. The boy backtracked, and Dhali said that
Mamata killed him to take revenge.
The police picked up Mamata on September 20, 2003
She was produced at Salt Lake Juvenile Court,
and, after being in correctional homes for about
two months, came back to the village on bail. The
police “indifference” enrages the villagers: "She
is a murderer. She goes after what really matters - the son. She beats everybody up, young men too.
But they don’t hit back at her, because after all
she is a girl. Her mother says she is a farm
labourer, but she is a prostitute and strange
women come to her place at night. She is into
meye pachar [trafficking of women]."
Ramakrishna’s Moitra’s wife said that her
daughter was being harassed by Mamata for which
her daughter’s in-laws were upset. "That’s why my
husband beat her. She has terrorized all the
villagers. Only photographing her was wrong." She
pulled out a letter written by Mamata to her
daughter. It was a passionate letter: "Last
night, I wrote your name across the courtyard.
You were sleeping then.“She had signed off,”E.T. Tomar Moner Manush."
Mamata’s trial is yet to start. Aparesh Das, the
deputy panchayat chief of Gyanrapota, said that
as the case was sub judice, the local
CPI(M)-controlled panchayat could do little:
"Although we condemn the incident we cannot go
against the villagers."
WITH INPUTS FROM RABI BANERJEE
After the fact
The Telegraph
February 15, 2007
A political scientist, a psychiatrist and a
lawyer comment on the incident in Boro Chupria.
NIVEDITA MENON (political scientist): Have you
heard of ’nude make-up’? The whole point of it is
to spend hours painting your face in order to
make it look like you have just finished
scrubbing it clean. The maintaining of social
order is rather like that. It requires the
faithful performance of daily rituals. Complex
networks of cultural reproduction are dedicated
to this sole purpose. But the ultimate goal is to
produce the effect of untouched naturalness.
There is thus zero tolerance for those who breach
this carefully produced natural order of society
by refusing to conform to norms of looks and
behaviour. The incident in which Mamata was
beaten, tonsured and stripped naked for ’behaving
like a boy’ is one instance of the effort that
goes into maintaining the natural order. It is
all too easy to understand it as the action of
uncivilized villagers. How different would the
response be though in, say, the head-office of a
multinational corporation, to a male employee who
insisted on wearing a sari and bindi at work?
Thus, while the horror that Mamata had to live
through may be at the more extreme end of a
spectrum, the point precisely is that it is a
spectrum of intolerance to difference. Each of us
bears responsibility in some degree for
maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which
could not be kept in place if every single one of
us did not play our part. From bringing up
children appropriately, to lovingly correcting or
punishing their inappropriate behaviour, to
staring at people who look different, to coercive
psychiatric and medical intervention, to
emotional blackmail, to physical violence. It’s a
range of slippages all the way.
But the incident was not only about
gender-appropriate looks and behaviour. It has
another equally significant dimension - the
anxiety around maintaining and protecting the
institution of marriage. That is, of ’actually
existing’ marriage - the patriarchal,
heterosexual kind. For the young girl was
tortured not only because she behaved like a boy,
but because she refused to give up her friendship
with a newly-married woman of the village.
The question of gender-appropriate behaviour is
thus inextricably linked to legitimate
procreative sexuality as embodied in the
patriarchal heterosexual family. This institution
is the foundation for maintaining property
relations as well as the source of the crucial
identities of caste and religion.
The ideology that sustains this institution
correctly recognizes non-heterosexual desire and
defiance of gendered appearance as signalling the
refusal to participate in the business of
reproducing society, with all its given
identities intact. The same threat is perceived
with heterosexual desire too, when it refuses to
flow in legitimate directions - hence the
violence unleashed on those who fall in love even
with people of the appropriate (that is,
’opposite’) sex, if they are of inappropriate
caste or religion.
Mamata is said to be 16, but is small and thin,
and “looks about 12”. How did she escape the
binding force of those protocols that most of us
seem to have internalized so unquestioningly?
Evidently, the structure built by those protocols
is shakier than it seems. There are fissures,
leakages, the borders are porous and vulnerable.
There are many more Mamatas, perhaps even inside
ourselves. It is precisely because the structure
is so fragile that such enormous force had to be
mobilized against the recalcitrance of one thin
little girl.
CHANDRASEKHAR MUKHERJI (psychiatrist): In today’s
rural India, tightly-knit hierarchies of caste,
class and privilege allow little room for a
tolerant accommodation of behaviour which is
perceived to be different or deviant. More often
than not, the victims of such disproportionate
community responses are women. Societal attitudes
to variations in sexual orientation have
fluctuated over the ages. References in ancient
Indian texts are not always stigmatizing. The
unbending morality of the Victorian era brought
with it the criminalization of homosexuality. The
vigour with which the Indian urban middle class
adopted such inflexible notions of correctness
stemmed from the need to identify with the
colonizer.
The penetration of such adopted attitudes into
rural India has been more uneven. Words and
phrases like masti and saheli rishte describe
same-sex relationships in rural India. However,
where difference is perceived as a threat and
perhaps even competition, the retaliation is
massive. But what of the girl-child who starts to
wear pants and behaves more and more ’like a
boy’? The outcomes vary. Some defy societal
stricture and ’marry’, as in Ambikapur or in
Chhattisgarh. In such instances, the strength of
their sexual orientation overcomes the knowledge
that they are committing to a life of pain and
stigmatization. Occasionally, I have come across
cases where the strong-willed and probably
privileged of such rural women undertake a
sex-change operation. But some, like the girl
suspected of ’being a boy’, are tonsured,
stripped and photographed naked. Comments made by
her co-villagers reveal not only her pitiful
loneliness but also an exaggerated demonization,
which often precede or accompany violent acts.
The ultimate loss in the small but structured
world of the village is that of reputation and
identity. There is nowhere to flee. I read with
interest Mamata’s comment, "I want to marry now.
It is the duty of every girl to marry." An act of
self-preservation, perhaps appeasement, to ward
off the frightening abyss of social oblivion.
TARUNABH KHAITAN (lawyer): The drama in Boro
Chupria is an old one. Countless Mamatas are
tortured and killed at the altar of caste, class,
religion and sex. Mamata’s transgressions were a
combination of who she allegedly was (’boyish’),
and what she allegedly did (developed
relationships/friendships with other women).
These acts of violence violate her most basic
human rights, most fundamentally the right to
life with dignity and the freedom from torture
and other forms of violence.
The failure of the state in providing protection
to the vulnerable is telling. The first mark of
the movement from a state of nature to civilized
society is the state’s establishment of a
monopoly over the use of force. The state alone
may judge and punish, following due process of
law. The Indian state may be failing its raison
d’être, for it protects unequally.
The demand, then, is one of fairness. For queer
identities that question the rules of gender and
sexuality, even a normative recognition of the
right to a dignified life is not forthcoming.
Legal provisions, such as Section 377 of the
Indian Penal Code, aid rather than counter
societal violence against sexual and gender
minorities. But the state alone is not to blame.
A society that engages in and tolerates
collective acts of violence against helpless
people is in urgent need of moral introspection.
The denial of the suffering of hijras, kothis,
gays, lesbians and bisexuals is usually disguised
as a need to deal with ’more important issues’,
like poverty. But suffering cannot be
hierarchized. Different facets of vulnerability
like class, caste, gender, sexuality, race,
religion and so on do not act independently of
one another, they intersect. The movements
founded by Dalits, women, religious minorities
and the poor share their most important article
of faith with sexual and gender minorities - a
belief in the equal moral worth of every
individual. Mamata’s story should be the last
word on the concern that gender and sexuality are
’elite’ issues.