[Reader-list] Ramjas students on protest, want action against faculty

[Aarti Sethi]

Dear Aditya,

Thank you for posting this. This is a serious problem. The political science
department at the Arts Faculty had an uphill struggle dealing with Bidyut
Chakrabarthy who had similar charges against him. Many friends were involved
in the struggle to get him out. The last few years have seen increasing
incidents of sexual harassment on campus and in the university area. The
difficult question of course is always how to address this without calling
for greater coersive measures. Some of us had written, some years ago,
trying to work through these questions for ourselves. Though written almost
three years ago we were responding then to three incidents of rape that had
occurred in and around DU. I'm  enclosing that text as an offering to think
together.

Warmly
Aarti

[The text was collaboratively written by the members of the Sarai.txt
editorial collective, which included then, besides me: Iram Ghufran, Smriti
Vohra and Shveta Sarda.]


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++


EYE / CONTACT


She enters the bus, finds only the last row free, and chooses to stand. She
waits for her pick up, as her shift as an agent ends, the memory of the
morning newspaper report resting uneasily under her skin. She fields
unwelcome glances and stray comments as she commutes to work from the
resettlement colony where she lives. She stands under a flyover at night,
soliciting clients, her eyes alert and watchful for the blinking lights of
police cars on patrol.


Our locations in, and journeys through, the city create intimate and
transient maps of anxiety - of what it means to walk down a sidewalk late at
night and fuss with one's duppata or palla to ensure one is adequately
covered, to hold books, tightly and defensively pressed to one's chest when
walking down the street. To enter a bus and automatically scan the seats
looking for a woman to sit next to, to hold arms close to the body,
shoulders turned in, when negotiating a crowd. To feel skin thickening into
chain-mail, that with time and experience, does not register tactile
assaults but moves on almost unassailed. To wonder whether the extra
pressure against your back, or the hand resting lightly against your thigh,
is a result of too many bodies and not enough space or whether it is
intended contact. To stiffen, muscles tensing as they contract, and break
contact regardless.


To do these things without thinking about them and without noticing their
being done. To know that this knowledge, and the sensory memories that
constitute it, is a compact, a shared memorandum of understanding between us
and the city.


Just as cities bring violence in their wake, violence brings questions in
its wake. Of the many discourses that layer around the kernel of an event,
especially a violent event – descriptive, evocative, interpretative - one
form that discourses take are prescriptive.


The inscriptions and signs that alert us to the shadow of violence, also
tell us the ways in which it can be confronted. The papers that detail
violence in its minute specificities, also carry notices of measures
described as antidotes: look over your shoulder, don't talk to strangers,
don't walk alone at night in dark places, does that person look suspicious?
Report immediately.


These measures counsel potential victims to transform, neutralise
'trangressive' behaviour - don't wear a certain kind of clothing, don't go
out at night. Don't talk to strangers. The distance from a stricture to not
step out at night for fear of the threat of violence, to establishing a
causal link between them, is not far. This performs a strange operation, a
shift in responsibility from the aggressor to the victim for the fact of
violence, and a pantheistic dispersal of threat so that all hands become
potential instruments of harm, and faces masks that cloak malicious intent.


The fear of violence done to us becomes a structural state, a matrix of
subterranean anxiety, in the grids of which we map our daily journeys and
make informed assessments of risk, threat and security. These assessments by
us, or by those who are charged with the 'safety' and 'security' of the
denizens of the city, translate into strictures, advice, admonitions,
demands, policy and protocol - to have PCR vans outside every college,
police bandobast outside all bus stops, to constitute a special women's
vigilance wing in the Delhi Police, to give rapists the death penalty. A
profusion of surveillance cameras to 'secure' public spaces, alongside
public safety advertisements to not look at strangers. The safety accorded
by the clinical eye of a lens, contrasted with the danger of looking into
the eyes of another human being.


And as larger and stronger structures are erected to address it - police
vans and all night vigils, and blue telephone booths and private security
agencies, and pepper spray over the counter and self defense classes – we,
in turn, re-negotiate our MOUs with our city - remember to call when you get
home, no I'll wait till you leave, let me walk you to the end of the road,
yes I'm carrying a shawl, don't worry I've noted down the number of the
rikshaw. We live in our cities, and find ways to negotiate how this can be
done.


Yet, to live is to exist always in the shadow of gazes - friendly glances,
intrusive stares, puzzled looks, or shy invitations. It is to field glances
which offer warmth, and sometimes wound, or are often indifferent. It is to
make eye contact.


Eye contact - she looks you directly in the eye when she speaks, he looks
away, she has a clear-eyed gaze and his glances are shifty. Glances meet, or
look away, or slide past each other, or come to rest at a point directly
behind your head. To make eye contact is to recognise and acknowledge.
Avoiding eye contact is the deferral of recognition. Eye contact is an
exchange. An exchange of? Recognition and hostility, or aggression and
paranoia, or warmth and camaraderie, or fear and suspicion, or desire, or
love, or simply an acknowledgment of presence. But it is to look with
consideration nonetheless. The making of eye contact in part signals a
desire to reciprocity.


Violent physical contact breaks this compact. Perhaps because the
performance of violence always involves either an absence of reciprocity, or
an effort at eliminating reciprocity. One measure of resistance, then, is
the refusal to look. To sever any suggestion of complicity in the
performance and spectacle of violence.


But in our lived negotiations with violence, and our attempts to understand
it, maybe it is important to keep alive a distinction between a structural
compulsion to look away, withdraw, exit, leave, secede, sever, as opposed to
a self-reflexive decision to refuse to bear witness to specific acts of
violence. To recognise that strictures which demand the former, might in
themselves do violence unto webs of everyday reciprocity which create the
reservoirs from which resources to heal are generated. It is also to
recognise that sometimes it is important to witness, look, be present for,
to maintain and nurture the web that ties my gaze to yours.


[This text was written as part of the "behind-the-scenes-writing" of Sarai.txt
2.3: The State You Are
In<http://www.sarai.net/publications/sarai.txt/05-the-state-you-are-in>.
The broadsheet emerged as a response to the increasing levels of violence
against women, escalating in two incidents of rape in the last month, in the
city in which we live – Delhi. It emerges from an attempt on our part, in
the collective, to try and find registers to articulate the matrices of
anxiety that are part of living, not just as women, but for all those who
live in cities.]