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Session #2: Tuesday, 28 December, 11.15 am - 1.00 pm (Tagore 4)
Panel coordinator(s): * (*)
Chair/discussant: Aparna Balachandran (*)
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Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
With the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967 the Israeli Government created a particular spacio-legal dilemma: expanding its territorial jurisdiction while withholding citizenship from the seized population. Since then, a nebulous but hyper-structured legal regime – made up of a patchwork of Ottoman, British Mandate and Jordanian laws collapsed into an overarching military system – has implemented a host of spatial technologies which helped operationalize the Zionist maxim of acquiring ‘a land without a people’ into reality, effectively legalizing the land without legalizing its people. Differential citizenship and apartheid are common practice in settler-colonial regimes, but this spacio-legal arrangement is particular in that it constitutes perpetual legal ambiguities rather than fixed categories and hierarchies, whose focus is to ‘civilize’ the land and not its people. The rupture between people and land was materialized and managed through zoning laws that confined Palestinian towns and cities within enclaves, severing the familial, social and economic relations between them, and confiscating the rest for use as Israeli military zones, nature reserves and settlements. The Oslo Accords consolidated the existing spatial structures and further reified Israeli spatial logic by fragmenting both space and the incumbent Palestinian sovereignty. Meta-zones of Areas A, B and C where created and placed on a sliding scale based on an inverse relationship between the two categories – the maximum space yielding minimum sovereignty. This space is Area C.
This essay examines the legal and spatial contradictions inherent in the Oslo regime, particularly in Area C, and its wider implications at this present time. In 2009, the Palestinian Prime Minister in the West Bank, Salam Fayyad kick-started a series of diplomatic and institutional efforts – largely through donors and humanitarian agencies – to sustain a de facto Palestinian presence in Area C as a precursor to de jure sovereignty. This collision of various actors not only generates critical questions about space and law, but amplifies the ambiguities at the heart of the institutional-jurisdictional set-up over the occupied territories. Can humanitarian interventions based on International Humanitarian Law and its strictly human dimension of ‘relief’, effectively protect populations dispossessed by spatial mechanisms? Are both legal and illegal forms of contestations in this space equally productive? If so, what are the characteristics of the legal order/disorder producing and, being produced by, these contestations? Could its differentia specifica be a form of ‘anarcho-legal’ order? Moreover, as people are being governed through space, what effect can their ‘spatial struggle’ then have on the laws and practices that govern them?
My paper argues that the policy of the colonial state in India had much to do with the way women's sexuality is perceived today. Through primarily legislative, but also non-legislative means, the sexuality of Indian women as well as British men was regulated for myriad reasons.
In the case of female sexuality, these were: the need to come up with a moral justification for rule in India, the need to keep both social reformers as well as traditionalists happy with British rule, and practical concerns like the need for a large labour force that required women to get married and reproduce early. The sexuality of the British male (especially officers and clerks) was regulated to keep up the semblance of racial and moral superiority and to address anxieties that the moral “degradation” seen in these young rulers would be the cause of the fall of the Empire.
I look specifically at the legislative regulation of prostitution, the devadasi tradition, widow remarriage and sambandhams where legislation was seen as a way of preserving the “morality” of the concerned women. I conclude that the colonial state directly and indirectly had much to do with firming notions of the "proper place" of women in Indian society as mothers and wives before sexual beings. Even though Indian society did not allow its women a great deal of autonomy or accord them more importance than property of their husbands before, the attitude towards sexuality was still more pragmatic and liberal than it was to be after colonial rule made its impact.
Throughout his life Jean Jacques Rousseau was convinced of his status as a prodigy – less in philosophy or political science than in sentiment and love. When Rousseau loved he ‘always loved too sincerely, too perfectly. Never were passions at the same time more lively and pure than mine; never was love more tender.’ He was similarly effusive about his own refinement of sentiment. It was, as he wrote, ‘benevolence aided by the passions which maintained an empire over me, which gave law to my heart.’ It is perhaps not surprising then that when Rousseau turned his mind to the politics of Empire, he converted a history of violent conquest into a tale of love, passion and perfidy.
This paper will explore the relationship between love, law and imperialism through the lens of a little known opera by Rousseau: La Découverte du Nouveau Monde.
I argue that Rousseau was not alone in using love as a means of explicating Empire. In the latter half of the 18th Century many colonial theorists, enlightenment scholars and liberal theorists discursively anchored state and imperial authority in domestic and romantic relations. This was a European trans-imperial trend expressive of an overarching desire to reconcile sentiment, virtue, inclusion and morality with sovereignty, liberty, exclusion and imperial expansion.
Love was enlisted by States and political theorists to transform militaristic imperial exploits into virtuous enterprises, and to render oppressive and exclusionary social arrangements moral and desirable. Discourses of love proved to be naturally adept when placed in the service of governance. The explicit biblical origins of love, linking humans with God, stamped imperial enterprise with divine approval rendering it ineluctable and natural – a consequence of a simple unfolding of time. Because of its biblical origins the language of love was also a language of sacrifice and surrender. As with the marriage contract, the Americans in Rousseau’s opera are able to consent to their subjugation as colonisation is structured as a romance. Love thus allows for an affective social contract to be formed where liberty can be surrendered, wills may be coerced, but the appearance of consent ensures that no one can be blamed.
The separation of lives into public and private domains is one of the bulwarks of modern “normative sexuality”- which in its purest form is domestic, “heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive and non-commercial”. The other bulwark was a sacral re-imagining, based on the public/private divide of Indian femininity and “womanhood” that accompanied the rise of nationalism during the colonial period. By contrast, the 19th century legal archive brims with stories that defy this norm -women poisoning their husbands to elope with their paramours, men ardently complaining of their wives’ infidelity, or their refusal to cohabit with them, of polyandrous women, of dancing girls who demand shares in their respectable lovers’ property, prostitutes who demand to be taken off registers. In several cases, the ‘erotic’ claims made by women are grounded in customary practices.Within the stories housed in these 'legal' archives, neither sacred Indian womanhood, nor for that matter Indian manhood appear particularly stable, and it takes all the pedagogic might of colonial law and nationalist politics to appropriately feminize women, masculinize men in order for the preferred heterosexual, monogamous patriarchal domestic utopia to obtain.The complex legal and cultural negotiations through which this division was delimited during the course of the 19th century is the subject of this paper. Custom, colonial patriarchal ideology, anti-colonial nationalism and legal interpretation played varying parts in the “cultural process” of lawmaking which resulted in the constitution of the public-private divide. In this paper, I traverse the legal archive to several moments during India’s colonial past where heterosexuality, masculinity, femininity and patriarchy were not as rigidly entrenched as they now appear.