The secondary sex

Aaliya Waziri's book is a brave and articulate attempt at dismantling patriarchy

In the Body of a Woman: Essays on Law, Gender and Society

Author: Aaliya Waziri

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 232

Price: Rs. 499

In the introduction to her 1949 book, The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir grapples with the many definitions of womanhood: “But first, what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: She is a womb’ some say.” She then deliberates over whether having a womb is the only prerequisite for being a woman; she considers the term “femininity” as part of the experience of womanhood. “Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven?” she philosophises.

Aaliya Waziri’s In the Body of a Woman: Essays on Law, Gender and Society is a fervent examination of the predicaments of the female sex. Though she has absorbed existentialists such as de Beauvoir, Ms Waziri is less philosophical but more urgently interrogative than the French feminist. Her essays are diligently researched observations on the horrors and perplexities of the milieu: Rape and sexual assault, spousal violence, cyberbullying, witch branding and hunting, maternity benefits and paternity leave, the befuddlement that shrouds abortion rights.

She begins with an investigation of the 2012 Delhi gang-rape; the essay ripples with the vehemence of a young person who is deeply conscious of what happened, and what changes have been made — legislatively and mentally — in the decade following the incident. “If the law has enough loopholes that allow accused persons to fall through the cracks of justice, what hope can we as young women have to survive in a society like ours?” she asks.

In the Body of a Woman is flecked with questions and perplexities that have no immediate resolution. In her discourse on the jurisprudence concerning marital rape, Ms Waziri, who is an advocate at the High Court of Delhi, amplifies inconsistencies in law-making. She mentions a 2021 Chattisgarh High Court ruling that stated that “sexual intercourse or any sexual act by a husband with his legally wedded wife is not rape”. In Kerala, however, marital rape became a valid ground for divorce.

There are essays that offer illuminating facts, statistics, and reports. For instance, in her examination of witch-hunting in India, she cites a report by the Odisha State Commission for Women, and an international non-governmental organisation, Action Aid, which observes that Dalit and tribal women are especially vulnerable to exploitation and brutality. “Why do we find the practice of witch-hunting in the deeply patriarchal societies of Bihar and Rajasthan as opposed to states with matriarchal structures?” she asks rhetorically, her questions an outcome of delving into data.

Ms Waziri scrutinised abortion rights, citing reports, judgments, and newspaper articles to delineate the precariousness of safe and legal abortion services. She infers from her study that unsafe abortions are the result of a lack of access to reproductive care. She amplifies the fact that European nations where abortion is legal and the use of contraception is high have the lowest abortion rates in the world (below 10 per 1,000 women between 15 to 44 years of age). She compares these figures to those of African, Latin American, and Caribbean countries, where the laws are restrictive and the abortion rates hover around 39 per 1,000 women.

In the Body of a Woman, with its statistical information and earnest endnotes, is an invaluable study of the intersection of the law and a gendered society. With self-conscious erudition and analysis, it tells of the social fragility of inhabiting a female body. Perhaps I, as a reader, sought in it thoughts and ideas of a quality that elude research, but are deeply felt. Several of the essays are laced with Ms Waziri’s indignation. But I longed to discover in her writings flashes of sardonic wit or original theorising of the type one encounters in de Beauvoir’s work. I was eager to unearth a distinctive voice beneath the jargon.

Deeply influenced by Adrienne Rich’s 1976 classic Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, I was looking for a smouldering blend of feminist history, personal anecdote, folklore and contemporary law in In the Body of a Woman. Instead, I found myself ploughing through too much information, and couldn’t help but wonder why her essays sometimes slipped into didacticism.

There are moments in the book that are incandescent with outrage, though narrated in a measured tone. The essay that describes the auction of Muslim women on a virtual portal GitHub in January 2022 achieves a palpable heat in its condemnation of online harassment. The author describes how she felt when she discovered that her mother, literary historian Rakhshanda Jalil, was among the women who had been “sold off” online, in a mock auction: “The rot has set in deep and it leaves sorrow in its wake. The ‘otherness’ is diabolical.”

Diabolical, indeed, is the grip of patriarchy, and In the Body of a Woman is a brave and articulate attempt at dismantling it. ”

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984