Abstract
Dead women, raped girls, women brutalised by their own families and by their own communities. These categories seem to circle back to India, to us, again and again. Whether it is the course of history, the momentum of religion, the pressures of modern living, or the enduring, insidious legacies of patriarchy, the bodies of dead women and children litter our narratives. We have become so immured to these deaths that we search instead for the motives of the victims, the truth of the stories, the ulterior purposes of the families that seek justice. How else can we explain our delving into the base political wrangling of one religion against another when a dead child lies at the heart of it all?