REFLECTIVE PAPER

Name - Karan Rajani

Class - BBA LLB (D)

Student ID – 21011207

Word Count – 955/1000 (including only content)

What is Brahmanical Patriarchy? How is ideal womanhood related to brahmanism and

how does it affect all women, according to Wadekar? Provide contemporary examples,
from law or otherwise where you see Brahmanical Patriarchy at play?
‘Brahmanical Patriarchy’, put simply, calls attention to the dominance and oppression by
upper castes and men over the lower castes, as well as the female population of India. It was
coined by Uma Chakravarti in 1993 in her piece titled ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical
Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State’. There is a crystal-clear contrast in
the way upper-caste and lower-caste women are treated, protected, and perceived in society,
as per Uma Chakravarti and Disha Wadekar. Upper-caste women continue to be perceived as
pure if their sexuality is controlled, and they are protected by men, who are restricting them
from engaging in all sorts of sexual activity with a lower-class male. As codified in the
Manusmriti, ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’ is preserved by controlling the upper-caste women
and by making sure their chastity is not lost. Lower-caste women are perceived as lustful
beings and are purely used by the upper-caste men to satisfy their carnal lust, while
humiliating and parading them naked, as seen in the Sirasgaon incident. This monstrous,
vulgar incident was described in a chapter titled ‘The Sexual Politics of Caste’, by Anupama
Rao. In another horrific incident in Maharashtra in the case of Tukaram vs the State of
Maharashtra, a young girl Mathura was raped in police custody, and what is extremely
appalling is that the judge did not consider Mathura a victim of rape owing to her frequent
engaging in sexual intercourse, as well as the lower-caste that she belonged to.
Ideal womanhood is related to Brahmanism, according to Disha Wadekar because the
modern judicial system sets a standard for an ‘ideal victim’ and an ‘ideal perpetrator’, as
illustrated in her article titles ‘Rejecting Ideal Victimhood’. She refers to Bahujan women
(lower caste women) as a default outsider to the criminal justice system. For example, in
Mathura’s case, the victim was labelled as someone who is habituated so sex, and
‘promiscuous’, casting a doubt on her character, rather than convicting the perpetrators. She
did not match the standard set for the ideal victim in the court of law. Similarly, upper-caste
men are not the ideal perpetrators, as explained by Disha. The court is of the belief that
upper-caste men cannot rape lower-caste women. Dwij-varna women (upper caste women)
meet the standard for the ideal victim in the lens of the court.
Contemporary examples of Brahmanical patriarchy were exemplified in Anupama Rao’s ‘The
Sexual Politics of Caste’, which will be highlighted in this paper. It is frightful to scrutinize
the Sirasgaon case, where heinous sexual offences were masked with the term ‘caste
violence’. What started as a petty argument when Dalit women tried accessing the village
well for water, turned into a grave sexual offence committed by caste Hindus. Among the
accused was ironically the village sarpanch, whose role is to maintain peace and harmony in
the village. The women were stripped and paraded naked from street to street, and brutally
raped. Their genitals were mutilated by upper-caste men, as a way to establish and secure
their hierarchy in the caste system, which is a tragic example of Brahmanical patriarchy. Even
though these incidents may be to humiliate the women, and primarily because they belong to
a lower caste, it is a sexual offence which is a heinous crime, and not merely a caste offence.
It is normalised by the victims themselves, as upper-caste privilege, and they think of it as
unspeakable acts that they have to be a victim of simply because of being born in the wrong
society which encourages the caste system.
Contemporary incidents mentioned by Wadekar in the context of ideal victimhood and
Brahmanism, as well as by Anupama Rao, as it was a grave sexual offence, is the Khairlanji
incident, which occurred in Maharashtra, when an entire Dalit family was lynched, over
something that started as a land grabbing incident. The upper-caste men laid the bodies of the
mother and daughter for display and for the villagers to continue kicking at the chaupal, even
after the death. Until weeks later, when word started to spread, and rallies began, nothing was
done about the perpetrators. When the Ambedkar Centre for Justice filed petitions in the
Supreme Court, the upper caste perpetrators were brought to trial. However, the sad reality is
some of them got bail in 2006, the year in which the incident occurred, and the others in
2008, soon after.
Another contemporary example is as recent as May 2023, when in Manipur, women were
being paraded naked and being inappropriately touched by a group of men. These clashes
between tribes have been going on for a while in Manipur, between the Meiti community and
the Kuki tribes. However, David Thiek, the kuki man who was involved in this disgusting act,
had his head chopped off by enraged villagers.
To conclude, these are 3 out of the many examples of such gruesome acts disguised by the
name of Brahmanical patriarchy and caste violence. This kind of thinking of an ideal woman
affects all women, whether they belong to the upper caste or lower caste. Upper caste women
are perceived to be ideal victims, while lower caste women are perceived to be sexual beings,
and promiscuous, and unworthy of being raped by upper caste men. Therefore, this kind of
Brahmanism has been entrenched in society for a very long time, and by the most recent
incidents, it does not look like it is going to vanish very soon. However, awareness is
spreading faster now than ever before, and as seen in the Khairlanji incident, even though the
accused was acquitted soon after the trial began, it is still an improvement from before that
they were brought to trial and jailed for at least 2 years. Lower-caste women and men are
habituated to this sort of abuse by the upper-caste people, that they have normalised it and
think of it as caste violence, when it is actually a much more gruesome offence than a simple
caste bias based offence.