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INTIMATE PUBLIC SPACES: POLICING “DOMESTIC CRUELTY” IN WOMEN’S CELLS, DELHI By Pooja Satyogi A dissertation submitted to The Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland November 2016 © 2016 Pooja Satyogi All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the relationship between the law and the police in the Special Protection Unit for Women and Children (Unit/Cell), Delhi. It explicates how the Unit works, post its restructuring in 2008, with the Dowry Prohibition Act (DPA), 1961, which criminalizes giving and receiving of dowry and Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes “domestic cruelty” within marriage (related or unrelated to dowry). Established in all the eleven districts of the city of Delhi in the 1980s, these special cells continue to be staffed mostly with non-uniformed women police officers. With time, the work of the Unit has come to be defined by conciliatory and mediatory practices that have to be exhausted before proceeding towards filing of a formal charge against any accused person. The Cells were always a special kind of policing institution, tied as they were to the DPA, therefore, any new interpretation in any of the laws related to the DPA directly impacts their working. This dissertation delineates three problematic, the contours of which are examined in the space of the Unit. These are: (i) how the police marshal factious meanings of law, as laid out by courts in India, in a milieu where narratives of violence they encounter constantly challenge courts’ interpretations of domestic violence; (ii) how the police perform restorative work in a shifting context where the premise of this form of police work often becomes a question of police’s legitimacy and constitutionality; and (iii) how it is in this contrasting field that individual police officers bear intensely individuated forms of accountability, which is amplified by working with contractual workers of the state, who bring their own understanding to the comprehension and actualization of law, ii while bearing little responsibility either towards the state or their colleagues. This dissertation explicates these emergent problematic, which are not readily present to be galvanized; rather they emerge in the intercalation between law and police work. Working with the police allows for attention to be drawn to processes that must be exhausted as a prerequisite to prosecution. The courtroom, however, is not absent in any complaint’s trajectory and pre-trial interventions do not remove the possibility of a trial; in fact, pre-trial is structured keeping in mind the eventual possibility of a courtroom trial. Chapter one explicates the first two problematic by showing how the DPA and the adjacent laws on domestic cruelty work by perpetuating a binary between customary practices and criminality. Chapter two explains how policing work is made possible by a heightened individuation of responsibility. Chapters three, four and five delineate biographies of three complaint cases in the Unit. The choice of a case-method stemmed from an understanding that concepts are not transcendental for a still unfolding reality and they can grow out of the singularity of cases. In the conclusion, I argue that an encounter with law cannot be understood only in terms of what it ultimately facilitates or fails to facilitate. A settlement or a compromise is only an external affirmation of working with law, with little bearing on how legal reasoning works in the social with varied and, often, unanticipated effects. Committee Members Veena Das, Anthropology and Humanities Naveeda Khan, Anthropology and Islamic Studies Juan Obarrio, Anthropology and Critical Theory Graham Mooney, History of Medicine Rochelle Tobias, German and Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought iii For my mother, who intrepidly negotiated the male dominated police force for 38 years iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation has long been in the making and would not have been possible without the enduring support and friendship of many people. I want to thank my teacher and advisor, Veena Das, for finding me a home in anthropology. I thank her for her unwavering support, love and warmth and for helping me think through many ethical questions during the fieldwork and the writing period. She forms one of the most exceptional presences in my life and my words remain, somewhat, inadequate in articulating the meanings she has enabled for me in life. My teachers Gurpreet Mahajan and Nivedita Menon, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi, helped me in thinking through the politics of gender and identity. I express my infinite gratitude for their nurturing engagement with my politically inchoate questions and for the care they continue to show for me. I would also like to thank my teachers at the Johns Hopkins University, Naveeda Khan, Jane Guyer, Pamela Reynolds, William E. Connolly, Aaron Goodfellow, Deborah Poole, Juan Obarrio and Graham Mooney, for their engagement with my work and their teaching. This work would not have been possible without their collective supervision. I have very beautiful memories of being in a class with Harry Marks and consider myself extremely fortunate to have been taught by him. I wish I had had some more time to learn from him and to show him this work. I am deeply indebted to the Department of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University for the support that has been extended to me in all these years that I have been away from Baltimore. Thank you, Richard Helman, Lexie Ebert and Clarissa Costley for all those technicalities that you have helped me navigate from a distance and for your continuing support. Fieldwork for this dissertation was funded by a generous grant from the American Association of University Women; and in its preliminary stages from grants provided by the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Institute for Global Studies at Johns Hopkins University. I am thankful also for the fieldwork funding received from the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. I gratefully acknowledge the support provided by these institutions. I am indebted to all the police officials of Delhi Police who have helped me in making this dissertation possible. I express my heartfelt gratitude to them for welcoming me, for letting me work with them and in facilitating this research infinitely. They all remain anonymous since I have to ensure confidentiality. I express my gratitude to the counselors and mediators at the Unit, who enabled an in-depth study of technical procedures of pre-litigation. I am also thankful to all the women who shared their experiences of domesticity with me. I hope I have been able to write about them responsibly and ethically. v I want to thank all my friends at Johns Hopkins for enabling me with their intellect and camaraderie. Thank you, Andrew Brandel, for your friendship, love, patience and kindness. Thank you, Vaibhav Saria, for your intimacy and large-heartedness. Thank you Caroline Block, Andrew Bush, Gabika Bockaj, Maya Ratnam, Megha Sehdev, Aditi Saraf, Bican Polat, Fouad Halbouni, Hester Betlam, Serra Hekyemez, Amy Krauss, Morgan Philbin and Lindsey Reynolds, for your critical engagement with my work and for your companionship over the years. The writing of this work has been made possible by working with friends in Delhi, who read and commented on chapter drafts extensively. This really helped me in re-reading my material differently, particularly in the last stages of writing. Thank you, Megha Anwer, Deepasri Baul, Sunalini Kumar, Anish Vanaik, Kriti Buddhiraja, Rachna Singh and Vrinda Marwah, for your intellectual engagement with my work. I thank you all for your comradeship and hope that we will continue with our reading and writing group for the rest of our lives. At different points in time, Samiksha Sehrawat, Debarati Guha, Ashley Tellis, G. Arunima, Sneh Jha, Prathama Banerjee, Maitrayee Roy Chaudhary, Shivani Kapoor, Shambhawi Tripathi, Subhashim Goswami and Priyanka Trehan, have sustained me with their friendship and love. I thank you all for letting me be a part of your life. I want to thank my colleagues and friends at the Lady Shri Ram College—Sharada Nair, Arti Minocha, Bindu Menon, Pankaj Jha, Nayana Dasgupta, Krishna Menon, Dipti Nath, Ujjayini Ray, Mitali Mishra, Vibhuti Duggal, Ngangom Maheshkanta Singh and Wafa Hamid—for their intellectual, emotional and political companionship. I express my deepest gratitude to my colleagues in the Department of Political Science for their support and for creating enabling conditions for the writing of this dissertation. Thank you, Ajith Rajappan, Deepa Ajith, Fajreena Biju, Biju Shereif and Snehal Sampat for your care, warmth and hospitality. Thank you, Priyanka Sarkar for your patience and for taking on editorial work on such a short notice. At Co-Workin, Delhi, I want extend my gratitude to Sasha Vivek, Arjun Banerjee, Shubhankar Kapoor for being the best co-workers there could possibly be and to Jitender and Akash for providing me with the finest work space or what I call my window seat. I could not have imagined a better place for writing this dissertation. Without the help of all my therapists and doctors, I would not have been able to complete this work. For their care and support, I want to thank Dr. Mamta Shah, Dr. Rinku Sengupta, Dr. A. S. Lata, Sobhith CP and Dr. Rohini Handa. Thank you, for continuing to heal me. My debt to you can never be adequately paid. My undying gratitude is also for the faceless, Elena Ferrante, whose writings and stories helped me bear the agonizing pain of loss of pregnancies. Nobody has ever told stories like you do, and while you remain faceless, your words resonate with me somewhere deep in my soul.

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