An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Priyanka Tripathi (Visiting Research Fellow 2023; Indian Institute of Technology Patna)
A Decolonial Reading of Caste/Class Narrative of Abortion as a Tool of Gender-Based Violence in Select Indian Literary Texts
In 2022, the Supreme Court of India declared a historic judgment stating that all women were entitled to safe and legal abortion under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (1971), which also deemed any discrimination based on marital status unconstitutional. The contention of the current research work moves beyond the accessibility question and safe abortion narrative. Instead, it treads into deconstructing the ideological construction of abortion as reflected in select literary texts (anglophone and translated into English) in India. The research hypothesis initiates a search for abortion being limited to upper caste (and, in a way, upper class) families in India, where the caste identity is considered more than just an intersectional component. It becomes a beacon bearer of the decolonial exclusivity of abortion in India. Women were considered essential facilitators in sustaining the purity of the bloodline and jati equivalence through the institutions of marriage and motherhood. Kinship and caste intermingled to maintain internal purity and further the upper castes' ends in the larger social hierarchy schematics. The formulation of these discourses becomes crucial in attributing the status of structural violence to exercising abortion in India. Within India, the narratives of abortion, as reflected in the selected literary texts, might be conceived as representing the elements of compulsion, choice, and coercion. The search for the elements of decoloniality (with a specific emphasis on caste) that confers exclusivity to the understanding of abortion in India will enable us to locate the nature of the ideological construction around abortion and vice-versa. Besides, no form of academic intervention within the ambit of abortion in India can pass over the infanticide question, which is entwined within the caste/class narrative. The geographical location and the caste identity as determinants in accessing abortion are empirically grounded. Ergo, the proposed research, being stimulated by the hypothesis that abortion is an upper-caste phenomenon, functions around two primary questions. Firstly, what determines the exploitation of abortion as a tool of gender-based violence in India? Secondly, how do the ideological constructs affect the initiation of abortion within the layers of compulsion, choice and coercion?
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https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
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