The Violence of Normal Times

This volume attempts to look at the experience and articulation of violence against women in relation to feminist debates and organizing on the issue, and the positive/negative responses to that articulation, particularly from the standpoint of law and the institutional apparatuses of the State. Its several essays focus on everyday settings: form justice dispensed by traditional authorities to modern courtrooms; domestic spaces; a home for mentally disabled women in Pune; a factory in Tamil Nadu. Moving from the routine to the extraordinary, the essays analyse the spectrum of violence against women that covers witch-hunting in adivasi communities; structural adjustment programmes and economic violence; violence against sexually marginalized groups; and against women of religious and ethnic minorities. Read together, they expose the extent of systemic violence against women in India, a violence so routinised that everyday forms of it slide into the gross and macabre in a seamless continuum.