Abhaya. Nirbhaya. Tilottama. Damini. Amanat.
Indian law forbids anyone from revealing the name of a rape victim. So the media chooses names for them.
They choose them carefully, with the best of intentions, names laden with symbolism. The 2012 gang rape victim in a moving bus in Delhi was Nirbhaya. In 2024, the young doctor raped and killed at R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata has become a Sister Courage of sorts — Abhaya.
The law merely forbids naming the victim. It does not ask us to give them new names. We give them new names for our own reasons. It’s easier to write about them if they have names. It works better in headlines. It sounds more powerful in slogans. Justice for Abhaya. Damini tum sangharsh karo. We are Tilottama.
These are logistical reasons. But perhaps there is something else at work here as well. Deep down, we know that we are all implicated in the rampant sexual objectification of women in popular culture and media. As Amrita Dasgupta, executive director of Swayam, an NGO working to end violence against women and girls, says, “These individuals who are being violent or committing acts of sexual violence are not coming from outer space. They come from your and my families.” We are quick to make Tilottamas and Nirbhayas our sisters and daughters but recoil from acknowledging their rapists as our brothers and sons. They are always the monstrous other.
Perhaps naming these victims Abhaya and Nirbhaya also allows us to not introspect about how we as a society failed them. The names we choose say more about what we retroactively project onto them rather than the reason they need these aliases in the first place. These names, noble and high-minded, spare us in some ways from having to wonder if, in fact, during the horrific assault they felt terrified rather than nirbhay. We feel less helpless when we turn them into a fearless Joan of Arc or a defiant Lakshmibai.
It is easier to channel our anger at the college principal or the police commissioner or a politician than to look inside us. Even as thousands used their smartphones as candles during protest marches for the R G Kar victim, according to news reports, thousands used those same phones to search “*victim’s name* rape video”. The same happened after the 2019 rape and murder of a veterinarian. Women who have gotten into altercations with men in public spaces like the Metro have said they have been told “R G Kar kore debo (I will do an R G Kar on you)”. Men have been arrested for molesting women at some of the protests.
With anger against the administration and police fever high, many shared memes showing a moustachioed Kolkata police officer wearing bangles and a woman’s skirt. Those sharing it said they just wanted to condemn the spinelessness of police officers. It did not occur to them to ask why the meme was equating spinelessness with skirts and bangles. And what doing so in the name of women’s safety means.
Meanwhile, the West Bengal government hastily issued a set of guidelines called Rattirer Shaathi to address women’s safety. Alongside measures like more CCTV, female security guards and a mobile phone app, they recommended that women not be given night shifts. In 2012, after a young woman was gang-raped in Gurgaon, the administration said women should not work after 8 pm. Someone on Twitter suggested that a better solution might be to impose a curfew on all men in Gurgaon after 8 pm. Of course everyone knows the latter is a joke but the former is put forth in all seriousness.
The consequences are there for all to see. Dasgupta of Swayam says one of her male staff was so horrified by the R G Kar case he told his daughter, who often came home from work after 10 pm, that she needed to quit her job. And she did. We named the victim Abhaya, but ironically she has made fathers like him more fearful than fearless.
Abhaya, Nirbhaya, Tilottama. We know these names are inspirational. But the power of the flame of the unknown soldier was also in not knowing the name. That blank space allowed the “unknown soldier” to stand in for you, me, everybody. The woman who died in R G Kar will always be somebody to her grieving friends and family. But now a name that was never hers will become the Google search term by which she will be remembered by everybody else. The government named their harsh anti-rape bill Aparajita to salute her indomitable spirit, but let’s not forget, she didn’t want to become a symbol of exceptional courage. After a 30-plus hour gruelling shift at the hospital, all she had wanted was to just get some rest.
Roy is a novelist and the author of Don’t Let Him Know
