Tourists on their first trip to India are often surprised by the way street abuse focuses on the sex lives of female relatives. However, any traveller soon realises that in India, everything, including the lexicon of abuse, revolves around family.
The traditional family structure is a key element of Indian exceptionalism. Relationships are defined with fantastic granularity. Western terms such as brother, aunt or sister-in-law convey much less information than the Indian "second-eldest brother", "aunt who is mother's elder sister" and "sister-in-law who is wife's younger sister".
It is also not surprising that desi sexual fantasies often involve keeping it in the family. According to the website www.pornmd.com, which has produced an exhaustive country-by-country compilation of the most common search words on porn sites, "mom" and "aunty" rank among the 10 most popular keywords for Indians. Pakistanis, incidentally, search as often for "sister" and "bhabhi".
Some relationships that might be considered incestuous elsewhere in the world are sanctioned by custom. In some Tamil communities, nieces often marry their maternal uncles. The dowry goes out of the family with the mother and comes back again with the daughter. In royal families before the abolition of zamindari, first cousins also married each other quite frequently. Again, this version of endogamy ensured property stayed within the family.
Oddly, some relationships that are not considered incestuous in most places are forbidden by custom in many parts of India. For example, a marriage between two unrelated strangers of the same "gotra" is barred. Khap panchayats ostracise, and even kill, couples who break that taboo.
"Rape" also features in the list of favourite Indian porn keywords mentioned above. This is yet another example of exceptionalism. Turkey is the only other country where searches for "rape" feature with a very high frequency on porn sites.
A casual acquaintance with classic Indian texts indicates rape was a common-or-garden practice. Rape, sometimes accompanied with abduction, features in a multitude of tales. It wasn't an unusual practice elsewhere either, going by literary references. The Greek, Roman and Norse classics are also full of graphic rapes.
The difference is that India has proudly maintained an unbroken cultural tradition in its fascination with rape. It has always been a popular motif in Indian cinema. Rape is depicted far more often onscreen than consensual sex. Villains like Ranjeet became stars by doing legendary rape scenes. YouTube is chock-a-block with compilations of "Bollywood hot rapes", "Tamil aunty rape" and the like.
The twinned obsession with rape and incest leads quite naturally to multitudes of Indians being raped by their relatives. Rape by a relative is about thrice as likely to occur as rape by a stranger, if we go by the National Crime Records Bureau statistics.
Given our heritage, it is unrealistic to expect our legislators to even comprehend nuanced concepts such as marital rape, voyeurism and stalking. There is nothing in the cultural mindset that defines consent as something granted by an individual.
In India, consent is traditionally granted by the family on behalf of a woman when her marriage is arranged. Her wishes don't enter the frame. If the woman is consulted and chooses to say "no", there is a risk of the entire construct of arranged marriage breaking down. That would indeed be a slippery slope since families would then have to rework all the ritualised negotiations of dowry and review all the inheritance implications.
Consent within marriage would, thus, mean cutting ourselves adrift from our cultural moorings. What is more important? The consent of an individual to a sexual act? Or the stability of a family structure that forms the very cornerstone of our "civilisation" (if one may use the word loosely)? No contest really so far as our legislators are concerned.
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