Narrating Marital Rape in Web Series: Social and Cultural Internalisation of Violence

Abstract

This paper attempts to intervene into the social and cultural internalisation of marital rape in India, and the violence accompanied with it through a web series titled Sampurna 1 (2022) written by Anuja Chattopadhyay, and directed by Sayantan Ghosal. Unlike domestic violence, marital rape does not have a legal recognition within the Indian Penal Code, but falls within the same domain. Through the journey of the two protagonists, my paper critically engages with the loopholes of the law, that fails to include marital rape as a distinct section, through feminist lens. Using the narrative of the protagonist, who represents the larger society, I attempt to study the physical and mental impact of the violence in marital rape. My paper shall probe into with the why of the violence and the why in the failure of its recognition. So, it uses Slavoj Zizek’s tool of subjective and objective violence to intervene into the penetration of violence in the act of marital rape. It also uses the anthropological feminist lens of Gerda Lerner, and the theoretical frameworks of Nivedita Menon, and Kamla Bhasin to identify the whys of this form of violence. The resistance of the protagonist in the text through chosen sisterhood foregrounds a united form of opposition against this systematic violence and its internalisation. In their act of united resistance, the women characters in the series develop their independent identity on their own terms, while also challenging the established order of patriarchal objective violence. Thus, the paper recognises and establishes marital rape not merely as physical and mental invasion but as a form of violent manifestation of patriarchal hegemony inherent within the norms of marital institution.