Women's Subjectivities of Suffering and Legal Rhetoric on Domestic Violence: Fissures in the Two Discourses

It is undoubtedly true that feminist politics in the last three decades has struggled to make visible an entire range of social practices that are inimical to women and brought them under the rubric of 'violence'. This article revisits the meaning of violence when translated in the language of law. In the courtroom, the meaning of violence has to be technically grounded as the law would want it to be, filtering from it many nuances that possibly existed at the time when the aggrieved woman was narrating her incident. This article therefore is an exploration of the legal rhetoric engaging with violence as faced by women within marriage; it argues that there is often a strong disjuncture with the subjectivities of suffering primarily due to the legal need for objective evidence. There are three parts: (a) how violence has been understood by the women's movement in India, (b) an analysis of some legal documents that understand primarily physical violence and (c) an exploration on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, which through legal language makes a formal provision on translating suffering.