Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Safeguarding Women Through Rape: Patriarchal Morality in Sowmya Rajendran’s the Lesson (2015)
Shraddha Jha, Dr. Amrita Satapathy
ABSTRACT:
The Lesson (2015) by Sowmya Rajendran is a spine-chilling, satirical take on a necropolitical India under moral policemen regulating women through state-sanctioned executives like the Adjustment Bureau, Prison of Illusion, Moral Policemen and Dupatta Regulators. Stripping women of all personal and political agency, the state instructs them on their sartorial choices, preys on unmarried lovers, and honour-kills pregnant teens. The most abominable act of violence done by the regime is punishing the dissenters by instructing a state-appointed rapist to ‘teach them a lesson’ by raping them. The Rapist becomes the nemesis of the educated, opinionated, individualistic woman. The protagonist’s rape lesson is broadcasted on television to impart a lesson in morality to all the bold women, whom the government viewed as recalcitrant. Rajendran’s (2015) novel has an uncanny resemblance to Indian women’s realities: four in five women are sexually harassed in Indian cities, delineating that Indian public spaces are not pro-women. What is further unsettling is that three in four men proclaim that women going out at night deserve to be sexually harassed. These statistics highlight the patriarchal attitude that males have the power to ‘protect’ and ‘rape’ women, depending on whether the woman in question qualifies as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This paper explores the rendering of vigilante justice by the self-proclaimed ‘moral policemen’ to victims of rape, through Rajendran’s fictional narrative The Lesson (2015). It also elucidates the lopsidedness of society’s power structures which sanctions these atrocities, and examines the crippling impact of this sexual terrorism on its victims.
keywords: Indian public spaces; moral policing; sexual terrorism; victim-blaming; vigilante justice