WE LIVE IN A SICK SOCIETY FOR SURE

(ROBBERS WHO CAME TO ROB A CHURCH END UP

RAPING A 74-YEAR OLD NUN)

For those of us who have been raised in the ’80s and ’90s Kolkata, gorging on Bengali and English books alike, dacoits and robbers have always mesmerised us to the point where even some of us had started worshipping such characters for their generosity, benevolence and their respect for women. I remember stumbling upon Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devi Chaudhurani while I was still grappling with the curiousity of an adolescent female. As I read through, I fell head over heels in love with Bhavani Pathak, the famous dacoit, tall, fair, handsome, with a deep baritone and a red tilak smeared upon his forehead who mentors the daughter-in-law of a cruel and selfish zamindar to take up arms and show her prowess. For me he was the dream man. Quite surprising, how could a dacoit’s personality draw an adolescent girl into hero worshipping? Would I then always go for the bad boys?

Years later, I realised that the reverence Pathak showed towards women, specially Devi, was a trait that touched me and I didn’t think twice about how the man earned his living, that by robbing others. I started respecting him.

Still I thought it was just a tale and refused to believe that dacoits and robbers can have any ethics. After all they rob, they kill. Even tales of Robin Hood were mere tales for me. Not to be believed in, just to be enjoyed as a read.

But while I discussed my views with my dad, who was the one to introduce me to Bengali books, I got to know a true story, an experience that his grandmother often shared with him and my mother. Dad’s grandmother was the daughter of a famous zamindar of Murshidabad. Her father died young and she was the only child. So she and her mother ran the estates. She remembered incidents where dacoits used to send letters in advance to state they will reach the estate to rob mentioning the time and date. Other than the fright of losing valuables, the women atleast never feared for their dignity. Dad’s grandmother had concluded that robbers and dacoits those days did have a lot of ethics. They came to rob. Women were not their target for sure. Even the leader saw to it that not a single man of his gang dared to touch any woman. We get a similar incident in Leela Majumdar’s Padipishir Bormi Baksho, while pishi travels through the forests and encounters a gang.

And surely, still living in Bengal in 2015, I can no longer hold the same respect for dacoits and robbers. Why in the heart of Nadia’s Ranaghat, at the centre of a bustling town, where a church and a convent not only becomes the target of robbers but also of one of the most henious brutality that India and Bengal has been repeatedly witnessing over the last few years? And it seems the reason for raping the 74-year-old nun of the convent was not because the nun was wearing revealing attire (as most rapists in India justify their action with, being provoked by women’s clothes and their attitude that lead them to rape!). Then why was she brutalised? Just because she tried to resist the robbers?

If so, then surely we live in a sick society. Where everything leads to rape. Rape seems to be seeing a new pattern in India these days. A woman resisting anything, be it a robbery, or be it protesting against rash driving, she is taught a lesson. And how? By violation of her body and in the process her dignity.

We all know for sure rape has got nothing to do with sexual pleasure, it has got something to do with domination, show of power. But what power were these robbers showing? From a place of worship they loot more than seven lakhs and some silverware from the church. If robbery was their only motive why did they need to brutalise an old woman? I wonder how a young woman like Devi would have been gangraped if she encountered the society of today? How Bhavani Pathak and his men would have enacted a scene out of the Delhi Rape Case.

And the adolescent me would have grown up with the sexual visuals of a perverse society where each and every crime lands up in rape. Just like my son is growing up. He sees the headlines every morning and relates stories of gangrape, while I at his age hero worshipped dacoits. After all we really do live in a sick society.