Comment critically on Linkages between Patriarchy and honour killings. (2010)
Honour killing is the murder of a woman, often with her partner, by her own kin for a union the kin group treats as defiling. Patriarchy — in Sylvia Walby’s sense, a system of structures through which men dominate and exploit women — supplies the motive, but alone under-explains. The linkage becomes intelligible only when patriarchy is specified by caste and land.
The structural linkage
- Uma Chakravarti, ‘Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India’ (EPW, 1993), gives the mechanism. Caste is reproduced through endogamy; endogamy requires control over whom women bear children to; so a woman’s sexuality is a matter of caste order, not private morality. An inter-caste or same-gotra love match is an attack on the caste group itself, and the killing is, for its perpetrators, structurally rational.
- Leela Dube’s seed-and-earth metaphor supplies the ideology: the man gives the seed carrying varna, the woman is only the field — so her body must be guarded.
- Prem Chowdhry (The Veiled Women, 1994; Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples, 2007) locates it in the dominant-caste peasantry of Haryana and the north-west. Where land is fragmenting, where an adverse sex ratio has produced a marriage squeeze, and where dominant-caste status faces challenge from below, the policing of daughters intensifies and khap panchayats enforce it as extra-judicial authority.
- Such killings concentrate among landed peasant castes, which is itself evidence: this is about property, lineage and status, not “tradition”.
- Women are victims and also enforcers. Deniz Kandiyoti’s Bargaining with Patriarchy (1988) explains why: older women police younger ones because their own standing was earned by compliance.
The critique
- The term is contaminated. “Honour” dignifies the act by adopting the killers’ vocabulary; shame killing or caste-based violence describes it more honestly.
- Patriarchy alone will not explain it. If male control of women sufficed, honour killing would be evenly distributed; it is not. Endogamy, land and dominant-caste anxiety do the causal work. Conversely, a purely caste-based account misses that the body policed is always the woman’s.
- The data are unusable as incidence. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 92 murders with an honour motive in 2017, 29 in 2018 and 24 in 2019 — figures so small against civil-society estimates that they measure registration practice, not occurrence. Most such deaths enter the record as suicide or accident.
- The state is complicit, not merely absent. Police treat elopement as abduction and return couples to their families; khaps overlap with electoral constituencies; and the Special Marriage Act, 1954 thirty-day public notice functions as an alert to hostile kin.
Law and its limits
Lata Singh (2006) held that an adult may marry whom she chooses; Arumugam Servai (2011) called khap intervention illegal; Shakti Vahini v. Union of India (2018) held that “class honour cannot smother the choice of an individual”, directing safe houses and fast-track trials. Safiya Sultana (Allahabad High Court, 2021) read the thirty-day notice down as optional. Enforcement runs through actors who share the norm.
Conclusion
The linkage is real but must be stated precisely: honour killing is what brahmanical patriarchy looks like when caste endogamy is defended by force under agrarian stress. Naming it caste violence rather than honour, counting it properly and clearing the legal obstacles to self-choice marriage will do more than further criminalisation.