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print version6 August 2009
It might be time to apply a psychoanalytical approach to honour killings and other social issues of our times, in order to devise ways to engage with pathologies at a community level, says Rakesh Shukla
The killing in July 2009 of 21-year-old Ved Pal in Singhwal village in Haryana when he had gone, accompanied by policemen, to pick up his wife Sonia, has re-focused attention on the honour killings of couples in accordance with a decision by the khap, or caste panchayat, and with the community’s complete approval. In this particular case, after carrying out the panchayat’s death sentence, a 400-strong mob from the village displayed the victim’s battered body like a trophy at a crossing in the centre of the village. Ved Pal had married Sonia, who belonged to the same gotra, four months earlier, against the wishes of her family.
The case is in keeping with an ongoing social practice in the Delhi-Haryana-Uttar Pradesh region, with an estimated 100 such killings annually. The murder of Manoj and Babli in Meerut in 2007, and the strangulation last year of Jasbir Singh and the six-month-pregnant Sunita in Karnal are only a few instances that have surfaced in the public domain. The reason cited by the khap panchayat for award of the death penalty is the “heinous†offence of marrying within the same gotra. According to the rationale offered, boys and girls belonging to the same gotra are like brothers and sisters. Therefore, marriage between two individuals from the same gotra amounts to incest and is sacrilege, remedied only by killing.
Incest is a strong taboo in almost all societies. As far as the enactment into law of this taboo is concerned, the Hindu Marriage Act of 1954 bars marriage between sapindas — people within the third generation in the line of ascent through the mother, and fifth generation in the line of ascent through the father. It also bars marriage between certain “degrees of prohibited relationships†, including brothers and sisters. The law thus clearly spells out the ingredients of a valid marriage and excludes marriage between close relatives.
The origins of gotra go back a long way. Like the Christian belief that all human beings are descended from Adam, the gotras are predicated on all Hindus having descended from certain sages like Bharadwaja, Vashisht, Vishwamitra and so on. The belief that persons from the same gotra are siblings and should not marry has no rational basis. Yet marriage between persons from the same gotra seems to evoke a great deal of moral indignation, fury and rage — enough to warrant brutal killings.
In the realm of the psyche, if something evokes feelings that are totally disproportionate in intensity to those warranted under the circumstances, it’s a pointer to the need to explore the source of the extreme emotion. For example, when the trial judge in one of the Nithari serial murder cases orders the death penalty for the accused, Moninder Singh Pandher, for leading a hedonistic lifestyle, it urges us to ask: How does a mind judicially trained to base convictions on evidence get so enraged at a hedonistic lifestyle as to convict and pronounce the death penalty? Perhaps it has something to do with the suppressed hedonistic parts of oneself which then surface in virulence disproportionate enough to order the death of the person who leads such a lifestyle. Similarly it may be worth exploring the source of the tremendous rage that seems to be generated when two individuals from the same gotra get married.
The moral indignation is ostensibly at the ‘vitiation’ of the ‘pure’ brother-sister bond by the act of marriage and sexual relations. At the conscious level, there is great reverence for the “pure†mother and sister. However, ‘mother-f*****’ and ‘sister-f*****’ are among the most common abuses and are part of routine speech in the region. In fact, interventions in incidents of harassment of women in public spaces often see the perpetrator called a ‘sister-f*****’, while simultaneously trying to make him feel ashamed by enquiring whether or not he has a mother or sisters at home — indicative of ‘unbrotherly’ and ‘non-son-like’ feelings towards mothers and sisters. These thoughts of a ‘pure’ mother and ‘virgin’ sister evoke strong feelings of guilt at being ‘bad’ and are possibly difficult to tolerate. They are buried deep in the unconscious.
Even whilst growing up, adolescent boys in general have no acceptable outlet for their pent-up sexual drive. The revering of brahmacharya (celibacy) along with beliefs about loss of semen leading to weakness of the body, mind and spirit acts as a block to healthy masturbation. Even when ‘indulged’ in, it comes ridden with guilt, anxieties and fears about the consequences. Sexual fantasies involving close family members, and lack of interaction and sexual activity among peers, fuels further frustration accompanied by feelings of guilt and perversion too stressful to bear; they are suppressed in the unconscious.
It is possible that these suppressed feelings are mobilised and projected and whipped into righteous frenzy when two people from the same gotra get married, implicit in which is the having of sexual relations. The transgressing couple becomes the repository of all that is ‘impure’ and ‘bad’, while one remains ‘pure’ and ‘good’. It leads to the crossing of a certain threshold where an ‘othering’ takes place, and the ‘evil’, ‘lustful’, ‘animal’ couple become transformed into beast-like creatures, threatening all that is ‘sacred’ and ‘pure’, and so deserving of death.
A psychotherapeutic approach believes in bringing on board feelings that have been swept under the carpet, into the unconscious, so that they can be processed and the person can enjoy better mental health. However, therapy remains confined to individual patients in a clinic. It may be worth exploring attempts to go beyond the limits of individual psychology and apply a psychoanalytical approach to the social issues of our times, in order to devise methods to engage with pathologies at a community level.
(Rakesh Shukla is a Supreme Court lawyer and is studying at the Centre for the Study of Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Delhi)
