Revenge and Retribution in Society, Politics and Literature in India

Vibha Singh Chauhan

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Chapter 9 Revenge and Retribution in Society, Politics and Literature in India

In: Eight Faces of Revenge

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Vibha Singh Chauhan

Vibha Singh Chauhan
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 111–124

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004380257_010

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Abstract

My chapter attempts to analyse the discourses of area studies, community, myth and culture; socio-political systems; media and literary narratives – both written and oral – and discuss the immense possibilities of the complex ambivalence inherent in the concept of revenge in post-colonial countries like India that continue to witness the co-existence of social, gender, caste and regional inequities with ‘modern’ political and economic democratic institutions. The ‘Khap Panchayats’ or the community courts in the north Indian state of Haryana symbolise the revenge that patriarchal customary order – in the name of honour – continues to wreck on individuated choice of marriage partners by young persons who in doing so challenge the long-established caste norms. The perceived offenders are physically tortured – often to death – despite the legislative enactment of the Special Marriages Act 1954 that grants validity to marriages across castes and religions. Oral narratives about unnatural deaths of women who had the potential of threatening normative patterns of caste and gender dominate many community myths in the countryside of the eastern state of Uttar Pradesh. Over times immemorial, these women have been turned into goddesses and worshipped over generations as an unending cycle of retribution by the same families that are instrumental for their deaths. Contemporary literature – especially in regional languages – represents ways in which the oppressed groups – especially women – subvert both law and political forces to legitimately empower themselves and take revenge for the silence and disempowerment imposed upon them by the empowered groups. They themselves become active agents of personal vengeance and recompense, making the moral necessity of guilt and retribution redundant in a socio-political order dependent for its existence on an individual’s power to vote in a desirable socio-political order.

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Eight Faces of Revenge

Series: At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries, Volume: 105

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004380257

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 15 Nov 2018

Subjects
- Philosophy
  - Social & Political Philosophy
- Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Chapter 9 Revenge and Retribution in Society, Politics and Literature in India

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Eight Faces of Revenge

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