Rerun and (not)Return of Phallus

Rerun & (not)return of the Phallus

The act of Rape is theorized, theorized in many ways, none scaled the reality! The latest feminist theory that rape is an expression of power also failed in case of India through the incident of a 28days toddler raped by 25 year old man(!) and going scot free. How could this be? Well, theories pour in to answer that too! All bovine scat to the least!

Rape is a weapon indeed, a weapon of torture, of subjugation, of threat and what not… what about this case? Is it a stray case? Check out the number of child rape [I deliberately do not use “paedophila” – the word is euphemism] in India, a whooping 3 a day!!! Tally that with the number of women being carnal oppressed, more than 26 a day and that number is highly debated as the number is increasing exponentially, tally it with the number of pogroms on Dalits and Muslims and associated mass rapes… there is no count to that! Rape is a nation-state cultural heritage- an Indian heritage, a Hindu heritage, an Indian sub-continental Islamic heritage [as it takes pride in marital rape and paving for raped victim married to the rapist] Rape is if not specifically, but loosely an Indian phenomenon!

Rape is there in every culture, every civilization and yet rape is very Indian. Rape is the one that is valorised and glorified as a divine act, all the Hindu male gods raped, all the Hindu kings raped with impunity and rape, multiple marriage, marital rape. Mutah marriges and all related acts were glorified. Rape is thus an act of male macho symbol. Poor English does not have a proper word, we have… we have “Pourush”, we have “Mardangi” , the poor westerns could only think of a cheap patronising called Chivalry. In India there Chivalry is not glorified but rape is. Protection of women means keeping women like cattle and then gifting them as many times as it could be and then dumping them into the widowdom on riverside after menopause – That is Hindutva. Rape is Hindutva and Hindutva is rape in every sense and metonymy of the word.

The mythology supports rape , glorifies it, considers this as a signature of maturity and of power [ “taqat” with special connotation and the most generally accepted on the streets and in the market place] Rape is then eulogized in verses. First the only value of a woman is weighed in terms of her chastity and then rape is used as a mark of royalty and a sense of upper caste position]. A man can rape but cannot accept water to drink from the victim, a man can rape and again prostrate before the god , ask forgiveness and be forgiven [ special atonement and redemption present both in Hindu and Islam as well]. Rape is never a crime, it is simply O-gomon [ some mis-advances]. Rape is a national tradition and culture.

We have been raping – the Indian male that is from time immemorial and with not much compunctions or qualms. An upper caste boy can rape women of lower caste of any age and be overlooked as children frolic [ North Indian value system]. Rapists in India are seldom convicted and even if so only with a maximum penalty of 7 years in royal style jail life-all taken care by the government at the expense of tax payers’ money. Our liberals take pride in giving them royal treatment in our jails.

Rape is our religious tradition, we put male deitry over female ones, we are allowed to dump our mothers and wives and sell off our daughters in the name of marriage and sanction marital rapes as our “modern” judiciary has declared that marriages are sanctioned and solemnized in heaven so marital rape is divine!

We in our supposedly oldest civilisation had been raping our mothers and foremathers and would be doing so for all the future generations to come! Rape is an Indian tradition! That our forefathers pumped in babies and squeezed them at least every year of the carrying life of our foremothers and considered that it is divine gift, it clearly shows how rapists are our forefathers who we respect and honour. We respected and honoured rapists throughout generations as our foreparents- what does that make us? Rapists indeed! Beyond the mere epitaph of Rapists-indirect! That no one known ever tried it with a 28 day toddler makes therefore the particular rapist an innovator , a great technologist, a trend-setter- we now await multiple and fast-forward repetition of the same act!

This one incident should have put the entire national collective identity to shame, it did not! We almost rejoiced the news value of the news – its sensation value! We had long commoditized rape and now we are doing it with toddler-rape… We Indians have now spread it worldwide, when even the soldiers in warring countries had failed till today we Indians have successfully transgressed the wolves, the occupying and ravaging soldiers of every nation- We are proud Indians, who would still consider ourselves as “Proud Indians” when some innovators would go on raping the just-born neo-natals – We are Indians indeed and Indian males of national pride! We take pride in becoming a Rapist Nation- Bande dharshakattom!

We romanticise genitalia- no not the women’s genitalia from which we all came out, we glorify phallus! Phallus is everywhere in India, phallus is worshipped by our girls in the name of religion. We “clean” phallus sculptures with milk [mapping semen] , we make girls drink that milk, in the name of again religion, we pour that milk on our rivers immediately killing the neo-natal fishes, we never give that milk to deserving hungry but drain it down the sewage system, we make our girls worship erect phallus and prostate before anything erect, we have our monuments imaged as phallus- that makes us Indians.

The 25 year old man who raped the 28 days toddler merely enacted a divine sanction purifying the baby. Our godmen ceremoniously rape women devotees and preach them that holy water is poured in, that makes these godmen even greater godmen, detached with any emotional attachment – that makes our godmen great and us as great devotees. The divinity ascribed in our phallus culture has made this man(!) a devoted follower of our traditions! An innovative performer! What the entire world could never imagine our boy has shown it in action! That is our Indianness! Why blame a great performer! Why not challenge ourselves? It is high time we did!