the cut is an echo : departures from visibility

Abstract

This thesis critically studies trauma in the context of natal family violence in India and builds a theory of flesh using liminagraphy as a ‘life-affirming research practice’ (Sheik 14) inviting a departure from visibility and a move towards abolitionary listening. Situated in decolonial studies and critical caste studies, this liminagraphic journey traverses the wounded continuum of the larger and smaller world/s we inhabit to make sense of our beingness and in doing so questions our understanding of home theorised as a cut and an echo. I analyse how interlocked systems of oppression like caste, colonialism, gender operate to uphold each other through institutions like the family that shapes and is simultaneously shaped by nationalist constructions. Grounding these questions in my experience of child sexual abuse within the family alongside using two reports on natal family violence in India, I look at the body as a messy, impossible archive to create echoing images elaborated on by poetic meditations through which I elicit a different understanding of trauma, visibility and listening. By analysing how multiple oppressive regimes converge to impede the centring of victim/survivors' needs, I urge an inquiry into seeing and listening. To facilitate this, I historically situate the construction of gender and family within caste patriarchy where the control of women’s bodies and sexuality is essential to maintain it (Ambedkar; Chakravarti). Therefore, I situate the family as a site of violence and study it in the context of the Indian nation-state formed through the collaboration between the colonial administration and dominant caste elites. The dominant Hindu intellectual visions of the nation as ‘Bharat Mata’ alluding to Hindu familial logics is a territorial nativist imagination that ruptured India through its efforts of forceful homogenisation. The wounds of this historical rupture continue to be exacerbated in the current Hindu-fascist political economy characterised by increased violence. I therefore situate family violence in relation to this larger continuum of violence to point towards the need for alternative ways of listening and being. This research builds on decolonial studies by putting it in conversation with South Asian anticaste, queer, feminist voices with voices from decolonial, queer feminist and Black studies.