Sreeparna Chattopadhyay’s The Gravity of Hope (published by Crossed Arrows in 2023)is an ethnographic account of domestic abuse and domestic violence among married women of Sundarnagar. These women belong to fifty-two households situated in an informal settlement or slum in north-eastern Mumbai. Her study emerges from personal, social and global concerns at the conjunction of socio-cultural hierarchies, and local and structural aspects of patriarchal norms. She uses the vantages of respect, love and fragility to understand and contextualise the discourse around domestic violence in India. Each section of the book begins with a poem, followed by vignettes from her fieldwork done fifteen years ago for her doctoral thesis. The book is a testament to the pertinence of her research today as the world experiences a shadow epidemic of domestic violence globally amid the COVID-19 pandemic. These times elicit a fresh engagement with the idea of the tactile in human relationships and issues concerning it in more Indigenous frameworks of the postcolonial-feminist make.

In the first section, Chattopadhyay discusses the nuances of negotiations around respect and respectability that the women of Sundarnagar undertake. The city of Mumbai offers a certain anonymity and agency to a woman like Kamini cohabiting with another man, having been abandoned by her husband. She still wears all the markers of a married woman and is able to retain her reputation in her natal family and village because of the emotional and material security offered by this man. Chattopadhyay discusses how the same women indulge in gossip and judge other women of the community over gender norms, in turn becoming agents perpetuating patriarchal structures. Friendliness or wearing clothes in a way deemed inappropriate and inviting male attention, or working at odd hours or in places like beer bars, are occasions for being morally suspect and undeserving of respect. Honour and respect have also been shown to be associated with the kind and timeliness of marriage, early and arranged marriages guaranteeing security of various kinds, particularly within the same caste/religious community. An individual’s status in terms of caste, whether native or migrant, owner or tenant, also tends to be factors resulting in acceptance or castigation by the community. Women who are outsiders as per these markers are sometimes labelled as witches who bring misfortune upon the native people.

The next section develops an argument on the interrelationship between love or its absence and violence in marital relationships. Chattopadhyay has rooted this discussion in the Indian legal landscape which is informed by the patriarchal-statist interpretation of love in/and marriage. In the Indian judicial system, non-consensual sex in marriage is not recognised as an offence, and consent is considered exterior to and continuous in marriage. Violence against women stemming from issues besides dowry still enjoys cultural and legal acceptance in India. Thus, Chattopadhyay demonstrates that coercion using emotional manipulation, invoking marital duty, or claiming the wife’s body for sex or to discipline, and even sexual humiliation, does not invite sanction or even castigation from the majority of the community. A good number of women too approve of beating to discipline, and maintaining that mental torture or abandonment is ‘zulm’. The evidence that the loss of means of livelihood in post-1980s Mumbai, in the aftermath of the collapse of textile mills, compounded by Shiv Sena’s regionalist politics led to a crisis, runs throughout the book. For both men and women, these larger political and economic conditions became underlying reasons to inflict and bear with everyday violence in different forms. Nevertheless, with sparse resources at their disposal, the women of Sundarnagar use creative ways to save the last bit of their dignity, like using spirituality and religion to abstain from sexual contact.

In the last section of the book, Chattopadhyay probes into and raises very important questions from the position of a self-conscious feminist ethnographer. She has attempted to de-romanticise agency and redefine it in relation to what she calls “household insecurity”, a term describing women’s agency vis-à-vis structural constraints caused by the larger political reality. An interesting stance that Chattopadhyay takes here is that of the need to politicise resilience and relocate it in a matrix of multiple disadvantages these women suffer. By moving beyond the hero/victim dichotomy, she puts forward the possibility of engaging in a discourse of fragility and vulnerability. Fragility as a concept embraces the idea of obligatory resilience in the face of survival and all other modes of personal, informal ways of resisting violence that these women often take to. An important contribution of this book lies also in its understanding of masculinity not as monolithic, ranging from hypermasculine to the feminist ally, based on conversations and discussions with men of Sundarnagar. An unconventional and striking aspect of this book is the sincerity and honesty with which it treats its subject. It shows a commitment to bring this very underreported issue to spaces of public discussion with the hope, as the title suggests, of finding ways to mitigate it.

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Shabeeh Rahat is an Assistant Professor at the Writing Center, CEPT University, Ahmedabad.