Abstract

In a dramatic postshow performance in January 2004, Kolkata police stormed the play 'Phataru', seeking to arrest actor Rudranil Ghosh on charges of rape brought by fellow-actor Oindrila Chakraborty, galvanizing conversations around rape in terms of sexual agency, marriage and fraud. I examine accounts of this hypervisible case against ethnographic data from other legal settings and other appellate cases which evoke and elide rape in the context of marriage. Legal categories for managing divorce, domestic violence and sexual violence have seemingly been negotiated separately (through political negotiations and feminist formulations), but they have come to shape each other as legal strategies, such that rape and marriage come to be mutually constituted, simultaneously delineating sexual and economic regimes. While judicial discourse around rape appears to have moved away from notions of property redress, these recent cases underline continuing constructions of rape in terms of specters of compensation and fraud, and the role of law in buttressing norms of kinship/conjugality over sexual agency. The task for feminists is to engage with ongoing legal constructions, challenging erasure of sexual agency or marriage as optimal solution, and seek signifiers transforming power relations encoded in rape.