Against White Feminism

by Against White Feminism (retail) (epub)

  If my husband, who is of Pakistani origin but had spent his entire life in the United States, were to have killed me, it would automatically have been called an act of “honor killing,” because both of us were Muslim. The Human Rights Watch definition of honor killing states: “Honor killings are acts of vengeance, usually death, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce—even from an abusive husband—or (allegedly) committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that ‘dishonors’ her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.”1

  My death would have met these criteria. At the same time, so would the deaths of any of the white women I met at the shelter who faced the prospect of intimate-partner violence because they had left a man or pursued a new relationship or had damaged the ego of some man in their lives. Honor and ego, no one seems to have noticed, are iterations of the same forces of patriarchal dominance. “Honor” makes sense to those in a collectivist society, “ego” to those who live in individualist one. Honor killing and ego killing are identical in their motivations to discipline and destroy women. The driving force in either case is a man who believes he is entitled to power over a woman’s life.

  The HRW definition does not prescribe that honor killing is specific to people of color. That is an implicit white assumption. A label of honor killing would never be attached to any of the thousands of white-on-white cases of intimate-partner violence. It is the presence of a Black or Brown male perpetrator that fosters the idea that a crime is determined by the cultural or religious identity of those involved.

  To go back once again to the British, the agenda of colonialism involved manufacturing definitions of new crimes and new classes of criminality to make a point about the moral degeneracy of the people whose freedom, goods, and land were being looted. This was central to the civilizing mission of the colonizers.

  As Bernard Cohn has documented in his book Imperialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, the British ruled by creating the ethnographic state, which meant they collected all and every form of data surrounding Indian life, practices, ethnicities and so on.2 They could tell Indians “facts” about themselves based on the data that they had collected. Some of the data was for benign purposes, but in other cases it was used to set different groups against each other. As the British East India Company became a colonial administration, the traditional systems of law, such Qazi courts or even grassroots institutions for dispute resolution such as village councils, found their power eviscerated. British-imposed conceptions of criminality (unlike the old traditional ones) tended to be impersonal and divorced from the intimate contextual knowledge that the former had possessed.3 In addition, convicted Indian criminals from this era, whether they were male or female, were often transported to other parts of the empire as indentured labor, thus solving the empire’s labor issues.4

  In the mid-nineteenth century, abortion and infanticide were classified as crimes in India, and Indian women became a new class of criminals. According to these rubrics, Indian women were baby killers worthy of enslavement in one instance, but hapless, oppressed beings that could only be saved by the British in others. The larger idea was to disrupt existing norms and mores and interpose colonial denominations in their place. The 1837 debates on the establishment of a Uniform Criminal Code in India emphasized that “even while there were no laws on abortion in England, the proposed criminal code must have laws against foeticide because of its widespread prevalence in India where illicit sex led to illegitimate pregnancies.”5 The premise that there were no laws against abortion in England was only partially true; the Ellenborough Act of 1802 did criminalize abortion, but the law was rarely enforced, with later statutes even creating an administrative option in which defendants were charged with “concealment of birth” rather than “criminal abortion” or “murder of an unborn child.”6 Conviction of the lesser offense was in fact common in suspected infanticide cases during the nineteenth century, since English juries were notoriously averse to ever handing down the death sentence that a murder conviction would entail.7

  In Britain at the time, sex outside monogamous marriage was considered just about the biggest threat to a socially ordered society. The social and legal ramifications for a woman found guilty of adultery were harsh, far-reaching, and usually irrevocable. So there was no reason to believe that British women were not conducting covert abortions where necessary to conceal those illicit couplings just as frequently as Indian women were. The likelihood of being charged with the lesser offenses detailed above were not included in the Indian discussion of the matter. Whether or not they may have been concerned with abortion in India itself, the white colonizers were clever enough to realize that painting Indians as inveterate baby killers was an ideal way to construct the colonized as criminal and hence to strip them of their humanity.

  In India, “infanticide” became a means to specifically prosecute women. The despicable crime of infanticide itself had long existed, but the practice of charging women for it began under the Infanticide Act of 1870, after which deaths of female infants could be attributed to men but the deaths of all male babies invoked prosecution of the mother.8 That is, for any cases in which a male child was killed, “the new innovation lay in the shift in culpability” from male leaders to women.9 The rendering of what was a complex situation into a singular apportioning of blame was what distinguished colonial law from customary practices. Unlike in Britain, women in India were actually convicted of infanticide. In April 1881, a Brahmin widow named Vijayalakshmi, aged twenty-four, was sentenced to death for killing her newborn illegitimate infant.

  The British had an ulterior motive in prosecuting Indian women for infanticide. Many of the women convicted of the crime but not sentenced to death were transported as indentured labor to other colonies.10 By the 1880s, the majority of convicts transported to Southeast Asia from other parts of the empire were women convicted of infanticide, and reports from the time suggest that four-fifths of all women imprisoned in India had been convicted of killing their own babies.11 Once they were transported to other British settlements, they were used as domestic forms of labor, notably cleaning, grinding grain, and sewing. Since most transported convicts were men, these same women were later also held responsible for the emergence of “vices” such as prostitution arising in the settlements.12

  Unsurprisingly, equivalent infanticide cases were given completely different treatment back home in England. In the late 1880s the widow Esther Bishop was tried for infanticide in Colchester. Her baby had been found dead in a laundry copper filled with water; the postmortem investigation suggested strongly that it had been born alive and had subsequently been drowned. The jury convicted Bishop of “concealment of birth.” This was typical of conviction patterns for infanticide cases tried in England at the time; the majority were settled with a conviction based on a lesser offense.13

  Infanticide was a horrendous crime, but in the application of the statute British judges and magistrates did not account for the specific conditions of the women coming before them, or the fact that for many the choice was to keep the baby and die oneself (without any way of guaranteeing that their illegitimate baby would be cared for) or live themselves and have the baby die. Even as they adopted the rhetoric of saving Indian women from barbarous men, they demonized the same Indian women suffering the consequences of sexual double standards and patriarchal control, alleging that Indian women were so prone to promiscuity and illegitimate sexual relations that they required harsh and particular punishment.14

  White colonizers manufactured similar moral panic in response to the practice of “sati,” or as Europeans called it, widow-immolation. (In Sanskrit, “sati” refers to the woman who dies, not the ritual, but because I am primarily referri
ng to European accounts I will use “sati” to mean the ritual.) The rite—which was not strictly a religious practice—involves a Brahmin widow casting herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, and it was rare in India even at the time. Large parts of the country did not practice the barbaric ritual at all; in other regions, it was restricted to certain castes. In the seventeenth century, when the British first encountered sati, witch-hunts, trials, and burnings were still being conducted across Europe and in the American colonies.15 Yet despite the many similarities in the “spectacle” of burning women, and the purportedly moral underpinnings for doing so, white people apparently only recognized violence against women when it was perpetuated by what they saw as primitive “other” cultures.

  Refusal to recognize British cultural brutalities stood in parallel to the refusal to recognize the brutality of colonialism itself. The European “Age of Discovery” required such claims of moral supremacy in order to justify colonial expansion and control. It did not matter that poor and largely powerless women at home in Britain could be subject to torture and then being burned alive at the stake with a cheering audience from the village in attendance, nor that the practice of sati was at least in some cases nominally consensual, arguably a tiny step more shocking than the very non-consensual process of witch-burning. The Indian ritual was primitive and extremist and its European counterpart was a normal part of the maintenance of order.

  To underscore this point, the British set about trying to prove not only that sati was a prevalent and integral part of Hindu culture but that it must be banned on humanitarian grounds. They searched for evidence of the practice in Hindu sacred scripture, combing the five-thousand-year-old Vedas (by no means easy, as they were not properly codified given the oral culture of the time) until they found a single reference that corroborated their own assumptions about sati, its religious character and its inhumanity. Thus they combined three imperialist moves: turning Hinduism into a monolithic religion based on scripture (which it was not); deciding which pundits’ interpretations to accept as legitimate (crowning themselves the final arbiters of “correct” Hinduism); and writing into historical existence a “tradition” of sati (which remains highly debatable).16

  Contemporary accounts of the act were penned by zealous British missionaries (few natives, let alone outsiders, had ever even seen it happen), and then regurgitated by future travelers. These accounts are transparently motivated by constructions of the racial other as “fundamentally incapable of providing either ‘normal’ emotional relationships or physical safety from sickness, violence, and even death without the benefit of Christian and in particular British interventions.”17 Gleefully dramatic reports such as this one about a fourteen-year-old widow, published in London magazine in 1827, were often recycled again and again: “She soon leaped from the flames and was seized, taken up by the hands and feet and again thrown upon it much burnt, she against sprung from the pile running to a well hard by laid herself upon the water course weeping bitterly. At length on her Uncle swearing by the Ganges that if she would seat herself on the cloth (that he provided) he would carry her home, she did so and was bound up in it and carried back to pile now more fiercely burning and thrown upon the flames.”18

  The British passed legislation criminalizing sati in 1829. It was one of the very first statutory interventions that the British made in India and the egregious barbarity of the practice duly emphasized the “moral” case for imposing colonial laws as the British presence transformed from a trading partnership into an occupation. Conveniently, around this time sati narratives began to include the British intervention and its positive effects. In 1829, William Bowley of the Church Missionary Society described an account of a sati in which he intervened and asked the widow, “Why do you destroy yourself?” to which she responded, “My Thakoor” (lord and husband), pointing to her husband’s corpse. Bowley then tells her, “This perishing corpse is not your Thakoor nor do you have any relation to him now that he is dead. He came into the world alone and is gone alone.” Bowley manages to convince her to let her husband be burned on the pyre and postpone her own burning till the next day. Overnight, Bowley tells his readers, he makes sure to have the widow guarded by Muslim police officers because he distrusts Hindus who could drug and kill her. In another conversation the next day, the widow confesses to Bowley that “all are her enemies” among her community. Bowley, the hero, is now able to procure her rescue: “I told her that if none of her relations would protect her, she might send to me and I would see that justice was done her. I also got the Police Officers to offer their services in the event of being oppressed and she was somewhat eased.”19

  Demonizing Hinduism as morally inferior to Christianity, sensationalized narratives of sati remained in circulation throughout Europe for decades to come. So crucial was sati’s position in the British imagination that an account of it even appears in Jules Verne’s adventure Around the World in Eighty Days, published almost fifty years later in 1873. In the novel, the protagonist Phileas Fogg encounters the practice deep in an Indian forest. His travel companion explains that a woman is shortly to be burned alive: “And, if she were not, you cannot conceive what treatment she would be obliged to submit to from her relatives. They would shave off her hair, feed her on a scanty allowance of rice, treat her with contempt; she would be looked upon as an unclean creature, and would die in some corner, like a scurvy dog.”20 In the “sati” of British colonial imagination, Hindus were cast as hypnotized by Brahmanic texts and hence incapable of disobeying them.

  As theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pointed out in her analysis of sati, the British saw highlighting and then abolishing the practice as part of their civilizing mission in India; they would “save” the native women. In contrast, Hindu men alleged that the women wanted to die. Thus two patriarchal systems, with white men on one side and Brown men on the other, erased the woman and there is “no space in which the sexed subaltern can speak.”21 Testimonials from Hindu women further call into question the religious basis of sati, suggesting that the concerns of widows were predominantly material and social, and not religious.22 The widows could not remarry, and if they did not have children (or even if they did) they had few means of supporting themselves or even protecting themselves from sexual violence, illegitimate pregnancies, and so on. In some areas, such women, presenting a threat to the domestic order and fidelity of husbands, had to live on the outskirts of villages with no social structures to support them. Sati was a rare response to an impossible situation, yet the white colonial conception of religion as “the structuring principle” of the Hindu society left no room for a wider consideration of the material hardship and social dimensions of widowhood.

  The modern phenomenon of honor killings in Muslim communities is also closely connected to the colonial interventions of white British occupiers in India. Precolonial Islamic jurisprudence and judicial practice involved a panoply of Qazi courts, all following different religious schools of thought, belonging to different sects, and thus often coming to different rulings on the same question. These included the four main Sunni schools of thought and two Shiite, all with different views on different subjects, including interpretations of the Quran, the Hadith (traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), and everything else. This intentional plurality of religious conflict resolution reflected a plurality of practices among the Indian Muslim population, and provided that population with plenty of opportunity to shop around and take their case to the court that seemed most appropriate to their own practices and beliefs. It was a dynamic and responsive justice system that reflected the realities of daily life and evolved with the times. Its growth and evolution was in fact a crucial essence of how law itself was conceptualized. In this sense, the Islamic legal system when it existed was the opposite of British law, built as it was on stare decisis, or the upholding of calcified precedents indefinitely into the future.

  The earliest records of the British establishing their own courts in India date back to
1726, when the East India Trading Company established mayors’ courts in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.23 By 1786, circuit courts had been established, followed by subsequent reforms that gradually replaced the British version of codified Hindu or Muslim law along with British Common Law. Prior to this, neither Muslim nor Hindu law was codified. The British eviscerated the extant pluralistic system of justice when they began to codify it by rolling everything into a single statute that was said to represent a majority of Indian Muslims. Islamic law, with its permissive forum-shopping, its openness to interpretations by various Qazis (judges), was inherently unsuited to codification, whose entire purpose was consolidation into singular laws and meanings.

  Even after the British Empire disintegrated, the legacy of this rigid perspective on one unified “Islamic law” persisted. Qazi courts were interconnected with (though not entirely dependent on) the Mughal and the Ottoman Empires, both of which were defeated by the British, whose legal system gradually replaced them. Today, Qazi courts, some informal and others state-sponsored, do exist in some parts of the world, but none are in the form in which they existed before the British colonization of India and the sectioning off of the Ottoman Empire. The consequence of using this one-size-fits-all model is that judges have little or no license to consider the individual circumstances of each case. And this in turn leaves the law open to abuse by bad actors. The problem was not with the statutes themselves but rather that the statutory form itself was the incorrect method of codification in that it precluded the possibilities of varying schools of thought and interpretations of issues in favor of the one that was recorded as the statute. One example of this can be seen in Pakistan’s 1990 “Qisas and Diyat Ordinance,” which allowed family members of the deceased to pardon a murderer from his or her sentence after the payment of “blood money.”24 The law does not exclusively apply to honor crimes, but its existence often makes prosecution of honor killings difficult. This would have been a good idea in a more pluralistic judicial system, where courts were able to consider the relevance of financial reparations for a crime on a case-by-case basis. This possibility, which would have allowed precluding cases that involved an honor killing or suspected honor killing, was not provided by the statute. The Qisas and Diyat Ordinance, whose intent is to provide monetary reparation to the victim’s family in exchange for the perpetrator’s freedom would no longer be a loophole for honor killers.