When people talk about striking a deal, what I remember are the innumerable deaths of women. This is because when a woman is alive, society brokers a deal over her dowry and when she is dead, the deal is over her body.
Marriage is a contract, as much as it is a ceremony. Drawing from her own life and marriage, a case worker writes about the nikahnama as a contract, the terms of which are seldom explained to women by maulvis.
The easiest thing to tell a woman in a violent marriage is to just leave. But is leaving always that simple? From financial vulnerabilities to a loss of kinships, to a turbulent clash of hope and fear, to a complex interplay of love and desire, the decision to not leave and stay in a violent marriage is not simple.
In 2013, Nirantar produced a short documentary on the non-binary experience in schools. Featuring Nrrups, Sunil and Rajarshi, the film travels from Kolkata to Bengaluru to Thane to meet people for whom school was the brutal part of their childhood.
We spent an afternoon with Nidhi Goyal, stand-up comic and disability activist, who experienced blindness age 15 onwards. She talks about how her city Mumbai changed for her, how notions of safety become fluid when your navigation is defined by dependance, the un-gendering of disabled bodies, and invisible forms of violence that often come within homes and caregiving.
As part of our series ‘Mann ke Mukhaute’ exploring mental landscapes from an experiential standpoint, the second episode features Sudha Arora’s story Rahogi Tum Wahi, an account of a woman at the other end of emotional violence.
