The aim of this chapter is to study the impact of marital rape or intimate partner violence in Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) and how it leads to the mutilation of physical and sexual autonomy of the female protagonist Saru. The focus will be on her journey from subjugation to assertion. Deshpande portrays women trapped in varying degrees within the threshold of middle-class Indian life, resulting in fractured identities and violated bodies. Marriage and family are the sites of patriarchal machinations that for women like Saru become spaces of wrath. Such structures coerce women into the system through appropriation of archetypes/stereotypes. The disproportionate power dynamics within marriage and motherhood dictate the distribution of gender roles. Her female protagonist smothers her protests, anger, and defiance in a ‘long' practiced silence. The burden of wifehood subsumes Saru's identity, despite the fact that she is a successful doctor.
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I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you. To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself. (Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 169)
Domestic violence is a recurrent yet ubiquitous social problem affecting different cultures and societies all over the world. Yet women who suffer such horrific abuse, more often than naught blame themselves and choose not to report it. Patriarchy conditions women to rationalize and internalized the abuse, justifying and accepting it as their fate. Their continuous and silent collusion with such oppressive forces jeopardises their physical, mental, and reproductive health.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) ‘Crime in India’ 2019 report, about 70% of women in India are victims of domestic violence (Singh, 2020, para. 2). However, despite the rampant abuse, there is very little account of the problem. Mahapatra et al. (2012) observes that in India, few community-based micro level studies are available, which pertain only to physical violence. There is hardly any evidence on psychological violence and sexual violence. There is also very limited empirical evidence of its various determinants, outcome, and their relationships (Mahapatra et al., 2012, para. 2). One such manifestation of domestic violence is marital rape. Marital rape is the act of forcing the spouse into having sex without consent. It violates the basic dignity of women and annihilates their fundamental right over their bodies.
Anirudh Pratap Singh (2020) states that while marital rape has been impeached in more than 100 countries, unfortunately, India is one of 36 countries that does not criminalize marital rape. Even though many legal amendments have been done in criminal law for the protection of the women, the non-criminalization of marital rape implies that a wife is presumed to deliver perpetual consent to have sex with her husband. The concept of marital rape in India is the epitome of what we call an “implied consent” (Singh, 2020, para. 5). Marriage is synonymous with sexual consent. Singh is of the opinion that the non-criminalised nature of marital rape emanates from the British era. The idea was largely influenced by and derived from the doctrine of merging the woman’s identity with that of her husband. At the time the IPC was drafted in the 1860s, a married woman was not considered an independent legal entity. The marital exception to the IPC’s definition of rape was drafted on the basis of Victorian patriarchal norms that did not recognize men and women as equals, did not allow married women to own property, and merged the identities of husband and wife under the “Doctrine of Coverture” (“Marital Rape in India”, 2020, para. 12).
The United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (Singh, 2020, para. 5). Writers and activists in India have through decades condemned marital rape and called for the amendment of laws. Yet the representation of marital rape in literature too has been far and few. Increasingly however Indian women writers are talking about the physical, psychological and sexual trauma of such gender based violence within the intimate and sacred spaces of family and home. The focus of these writers is to delineate the reality of the lives of the women battered by violence, as they deal with their angst, anger and pain like Meena Kandasamy’s fictionalized account of her own abusive marriage in When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait Of The Writer As A Young Wife (2017). Kandasamy’s grim narrative conveys the chilling truth that the rapist here is no stranger, but a man who has the right to do what he pleases with her body. For her it is rape as ownership. This paper aims to look at the issue of marital rape or intimate partner violence as represented in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980), and how it leads to the mutilation of physical and sexual autonomy of the protagonist Saru, creating within the self and the home, spaces of wrath.