Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: HEN A SENIOR politician in India famously commented that a woman who is raped is a zinda laash, or a living corpse, it was in response to the violent gang rape and eventual death of Jyoti Singh, a case that caught the world's attention.Protests broke out across the country as people demanded justice.Sushma Swaraj, at the time the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, made the statement before her party came to power in 2014, and she was eventually appointed the minister of external affairs.She remained an important figure within the BJP until she died in 2019.Her words were illustrative of many public statements by party officials."Talking about rape as the worst thing to happen to a woman and not the worst thing done by a man gives the message that, in India, a woman's 'purity' is her sexual trademark and if that is 'lost or violated' there's nothing more to the woman [or her life]," Madhavi Menon, the director of the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University, told Index as she reflected on the incident.Around the same time as the Singh case, conversations about sex were also being widely held in India.Paromita Vohra, a filmmaker, writer and educator, told Index: "We saw a lot of content that developed in India was totally taken from the West, imposing a language and context that may not really be culturally relevant."With this gap in mind, eventually Vohra founded the multimedia sex education project Agents of Ishq, which discusses sex, love and desire through videos, comics, podcasts and other creative mediums.Quizzes and memes
Source: Index on Censorship
Author: Mehk Chakraborty
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4366518796