SALON

Saturday, Dec 29, 2012 10:40 PM UTC

“We live alongside tragedy, neglect, suffering”

Rage-filled protests continue in India after a rape victim dies. But rage alone won't stop violence against women

By

Topics: India, India rape, Violence Against Women, Sexual assault,

A police hearse believed to be carrying the body of the young Indian woman who was gang raped leaves Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore. (Credit: AP/Wong Maye-e)

Four days after the 23-year-old woman, who died early this morning, was gang-raped in a Delhi bus, the headlines of the Deccan Herald read, “Minor Raped in City Shop.” A 15-year-old girl in Bangalore (where I live) went to the corner shop (we all have one) and didn’t come home. Her family discovered her there, nearly naked, hands and legs bound with her own dupatta. She reported that the shopkeeper and his two friends had teased her, pushed her inside, closed the shutters and raped her. The Delhi rape also received front-page coverage. The remaining pages of the same issue contained the news of a young boy’s murder, two suicides, a kidnapping hostage found dead in a canal, a five-year-old sexually abused in Bidar, two separate road accidents in which a total of seven people perished, the death of a militant in Kashmir and that of a civilian in Manipur, both during military encounters.

All of this in a single day. And it is only what the Deccan Herald had room to print.

What happened in Delhi has provoked, and continues to provoke, an outcry across India, as it rightly should. There have been protests and slogans. There have been vigils and calls for revenge. There has been, above all, rage. But rage is a peculiar emotion. It is incandescent and gratifying, but it is temporary. It cannot sustain itself, or us. It burns out and leaves us cold and empty. Still, day after day after day, the news continues to pour in, demanding attention, demanding further rage. And, gradually, something terrible starts to happen. Rage is replaced by resignation. We read, but we do not feel. We know, but we cannot bring ourselves to act.

We have developed, in this country, a capacity for living alongside tragedy and neglect and suffering, a way of moving through our cities with a firm clamp on our senses and our hearts and our minds. It is a deadness that creeps into all aspects of our lives. Garbage piles up on our streets, but we have learned not to smell it. The din of traffic is deafening, but we have discovered the trick of blocking it out. We step over feces on the pavement — dog, human, cow — without pausing in our conversations. We avert our eyes from the man urinating against the wall. From the child with the rheumy eyes and bloated belly. From the woman curled up in the corner. From the collapsing buildings and factory fires and army encounters in remote forests, from the murders and suicides and rapes. From all that is too much. We draw back into ourselves, into our homes, shrinking and shoring up our lives until they end at our doorsteps. What lies beyond is, to us, a broken world, impossible to comprehend or control, and so each time we step into it we are half-asleep, fully armored, already prepared to ignore what we know we will find.

But now and then, something happens that is so precise and so awful, it cracks the armor wide open. A young woman gets into a bus and is beaten and raped by six men. An iron rod is shoved into her. Her intestines are crushed. She is flung onto the road like a piece of trash. In a Singapore hospital, she dies.

Even the most deadened of us are stirred. Rage begins to quicken and flow in our veins. We cry for the castration of the rapists. We call for their deaths. We spend ourselves in rage. And, spent, I fear we will sink back into the habit of resignation, into our private worlds, waiting for the next thing to come along that is awful enough to crack us open again.

Rage is vital. We cannot do without it. Rage is what makes us spill into the streets, screaming for justice. It is what makes us pressure policymakers and law enforcers to do their jobs better. It is what makes us challenge the vile and damaging remarks we have been hearing from our politicians. But rage will not suffice. We also need compassion. Compassion, from com – “together” and pati – “to suffer.” To suffer together, in other words. In a way that will remain with us long after the headlines move on — and they will — to something else. To suffer, and keep suffering, in a way that envelops and yet extends beyond the young woman whose death we are now mourning, beyond the boundaries of our own lives, to cover the sum of everything we know. In a way that recognizes and participates in the suffering of the people we will never meet, as well as the suffering of people we see each day.

Compassion, unlike rage, is a daily emotion, requiring effort, requiring imagination. It is exhausting in its own way, but it will not crack us open the way rage does. It will peel us away instead, layer by layer, until we have nothing to hide behind, and no need to hide behind anything, and we can leave our houses and see, maybe for the first time, what kind of country we live in.

Continue Reading Close

Madhuri Vijay is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She lives in Bangalore. More Madhuri Vijay.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 2 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations