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

[Aarti Sethi]

Dear Aditya,

I know that Jagori have been documenting resources on sexual harrasment over
several years. I can help you get in touch with them if you wish. I'm sure
youre already part of the safe campus initiative. I think the question we
were trying to think through was, how do we respond to violence outside of a
discourse that posits greater restriction and security of women as the only
option. And this is a very live question for us. For instance the hostel
rules in almost every hostel in Delhi, except JNU, are extremely restrictive
of women. So women have to get back by a certain time, have to get
permission for night outs and are allowed only a certain number every month,
cannot have any male visitors up to their rooms and so on. And all this is
done in the name of making women safer. College administrations respond with
ferocity when ever anyone challanges these rules, and dissenters are asked
to pack their bags and their LG's are called. And we must remember that what
actually underwrites all of this is also a deep discomfort with women's
sexuality and agency. So when harrasment does occur its seen as "punishment"
for wayward behaviour. Can we think about these issues without asking for
more police protection? that is my question. And it is a difficult and
worrying question to which I don't have any answers....

best
Aarti

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Aditya Raj Kaul <kauladityaraj at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Aarti,
>
>    Thanks indeed for responding and for the much needed support. The text
> provided by you is important, was helpful; have shared it with my friends
> in
> DU.
>
> Let me know if some more important material on Sexual Harassment in DU or
> elsewhere in the capital is available. It would certainly be of great help.
>
> Regards
> Aditya Raj Kaul
>
> On 9/24/08, Aarti Sethi <aarti.sethi at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.]
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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