Why I Chose Feminism

Why I Chose Feminism 

 

I was born into a family where no one—not even today—fully understands what feminism means. The word was never spoken in our home. It didn’t appear in conversations, and no one ever questioned the roles we were all expected to play. I didn’t inherit feminism. I found it on my own.

It began when I encountered violence—sudden, disorienting, and deeply personal. I didn’t have the language to name it at first. I didn’t have the tools to understand what was happening around me, let alone resist it. But I knew something was wrong—terribly wrong. And so I turned to books. I started reading, listening, watching, and learning. I began to piece together the puzzle of a world that had never really made room for women like me to ask questions, let alone demand answers.

As I listened to experts speak on violence, power, and gender, I started seeing the pattern—not just in my life, but everywhere. I realized that this wasn’t just about individual pain. It was a system. A structure. A mechanism of control. The more I learned, the more clearly I could see how deeply patriarchy is woven into the fabric of our societies. For centuries, men have held power—over land, wealth, laws, and even over women’s bodies—while women, who do the invisible and essential labour of keeping life going, are denied basic agency and recognition.

I saw how toxic masculinity feeds on domination and silence. How it distorts love into control, power into entitlement. I understood, with painful clarity, how male ego—unchecked and unchallenged—can go as far as to torture, to kill, simply to maintain its illusion of superiority.

That’s when I chose feminism.

Not as a slogan or a trend—but as a lifeline. As a political and moral awakening. Feminism gave me the language I never had. It gave me a way to name what was happening, to understand the violence, to locate myself in a larger history of resistance led by women across time and place.

We live in a world still deeply shaped by patriarchy—a system that has upheld male dominance for thousands of years while silencing, excluding, and devaluing women. Feminism, to me, is a commitment to justice. It is about confronting and dismantling those deep-rooted inequalities and inherited lies that harm not only women, but everyone.

Patriarchy decides who gets to speak, who gets heard, and who holds power. It is present in everyday discrimination, in the glorification of aggression, and in the silence forced upon survivors. Too often, men have used their positions of privilege to lie, abuse, abandon, and escape responsibility. They have built systems to protect their power and waged wars to defend it—wars both literal and psychological.

Meanwhile, women—often invisible in history—have held the world together. They have raised generations, tended to wounds, and built peace in the quiet spaces of life. They have resisted in both subtle and radical ways, often without acknowledgment, often without rest.

Feminism is about honouring those women. It is about naming the truths society tries to hide. It is about demanding recognition, equity, and dignity. It is about imagining a world where no one is punished for their gender, where power is not used to destroy, but to heal.

I chose feminism because I believe in that world—a world more honest, more compassionate, and more just. And I choose it again, every day.

The Long Road to Healing: What Surviving Violence Really Means

 The Long Road to Healing: Turning Pain into Power

Processing pain is never simple.

Experiencing violence leaves deep, often invisible wounds. It changes you—how you see the world, how you relate to others, and how you understand yourself. Walking away from that kind of trauma is an act of immense courage. But what few people talk about is what comes next.

Because leaving is not the end. It’s the beginning of a long and often painful process called healing.

And healing isn’t neat or linear. It’s messy, confusing, and deeply personal. It can take years, sometimes decades, to learn how to breathe freely again, to trust again, and most of all, to live without the constant weight of fear or shame. But here's the truth I’ve come to know: healing involves embracing the pain, not avoiding it.

You can’t outrun it. You can’t bury it forever. To truly heal, you have to face the pain head-on, sit with it, understand it, and begin to reprocess it—so it becomes your strength, not your weakness.

This truth comes not only from my own journey, but from the countless stories I’ve witnessed as a woman, a survivor, a lawyer, and a researcher. In every woman I’ve met who has survived violence, I’ve seen the same pattern: the pain doesn’t disappear, but with time, reflection, and support, it begins to transform.

At first, the pain is raw—it consumes everything. It’s the voice in your head, the ache in your chest, the fear that follows you even into safety. Survivors often live on high alert, cautious and guarded. Trust becomes rare, even with those who mean no harm. And there's always that fear that the past will find its way back in.

But healing asks something radical of us. It wants us to embrace the pain and turn it into radical power. 

It asks us to stop running. To turn toward the pain instead of away from it. To give ourselves permission to feel what we tried so hard to suppress. And when we do that, when we face the anger, grief, confusion, and fear, something begins to shift.

The pain doesn’t vanish. But it begins to lose its grip. It becomes part of your story, not the whole story.

Eventually, what once felt like a wound becomes a scar. A mark of survival. A reminder of strength. And in that transformation, we find power. Pain, when reprocessed with intention and care, can become the very foundation of resilience.

I won't pretend it’s easy. It’s not. Healing is a lifelong process. It’s choosing yourself every day, even when you don’t feel strong. It’s reaching out when you want to shut down. It’s allowing yourself to be seen, to be vulnerable, to be human.

But it’s worth it.

To anyone reading this who is still in that process: You are not alone. Your pain is real, but it does not define you. With time, patience, and the right support, it can become your strength. And in owning your story—every broken, beautiful part of it—you create space for others to do the same.

This is how we heal. This is how we rise.

Family courts uphold family ideologies, not gender justice

 

Family courts uphold family ideologies, not gender justice

During the 1980s, the demands were made by the women's movement to establish family courts, and the Family Court Act was enacted in 1984. The law provides for specialized forums to deal with ‘matrimonial conflicts’ and not domestic violence. These are designed to adjudicate matters such as divorce, custody suits, maintenance, restitution of conjugal rights, and connected issues. The goal is to make the courts accessible and less intimidating for women through dispensing with lawyers, legalistic jargon, strict rules of procedure, and standards of evidence.

These courts depicted mediation as an alternative to the patriarchy-inspired adversary system. This is preferred by many because of its reputation for providing a better hearing. Yet this system could not aid in reducing violence or enabling justice for women. Studies have shown that the family courts are not free from difficulties like backlogs, the exploitative commercial approach of lawyers, long, drawn-out battles, multiple court proceedings, and the insensitive approach of officials.

Family courts were created to avoid cumbersome litigation and replace it with samjhauta, or ‘brokering compromises’, to achieve efficiency and to shed the burden of the law. These courts mandatorily offer coercive persuasions to forcefully push women back to the violent families, to ‘adjust’, to ‘compromise’ to ‘preserve marriage’, even if it endangers their life and limb. An idea that is constantly being pushed is that the family is equipped to protect women while underplaying violence in it. Perhaps it is easier and more economical to compel women rather than question a man’s violent behavior. What is erroneously strengthened is the belief that women prefer to stay within abusive households, and therefore, through ‘forced compromises’, they are compelled to accept the violent situation without any guarantee of their safety or security. No options are offered outside the domain of the ‘sacrosanct’ family. The rhetoric of ‘counselling’, ‘mediation’ or ‘settlement’ reiterates the regressive family ideology rather than protecting women from violence or providing psycho-social support to victims. The focus on settling ‘family disputes’ could not deal with the serious violence women face. Family courts negate women’s experience of violence rather than providing justice. Theoretically, an adversary system is replaced to resolve matters expeditiously and harmoniously, but in reality, the criminal justice system is twisted to adjust to the tenor of the patriarchy.

The alternative dispute resolution system diluted the seriousness of domestic violence in various ways. The language itself deliberately lessens the gravity of an offense committed within the chardiwari of the household. The term ‘dispute’ entails that two parties are equal, as compared to the term ‘violence’ which implies an abuse of power. The concept of parity among parties on unequal footing is introduced silently by the slyness of the patriarchal forces. No attempts have been made to question the inequality in the relationship. This misconceived approach overlooks the fact that conciliation as a technique poses grave problems, as it overlooks the concept of power within the relation. It expands the state’s control over individual behavior within families, and more specifically, it is at times being used to cement the norms of a ‘good wife’, ‘good mother’, or a ‘bad woman’. Further, denial of anger and the command to forget the past and live in the present generate dissatisfaction and give rise to a feeling of injustice. The law has reinforced patriarchal oppression while discriminating against women.

Mediation avoids questions relating to power, property, and violence within a relationship. The use of coercion in a situation where two parties are not on par creates problems rather than resolving issues. This process of ‘coercive harmony’, as explained by Laura Nader, destroys rights by limiting discussion of the past. It prohibits anger, curtails freedom, eliminates choices, and removes protection of the law. It ignores a ‘victim’ status and compels a woman to compromise her health, life, or limb. Mediation within marriage does not address the structure of power located within the relationship and ignores the fact that parties in conflict in no way operate within the universe of ‘balanced bargaining equity’. It does not satisfy the survivor’s need for justice. Rather, it normalizes and trivializes the violence in everyday lives and compels survivors to curtail their emotions and hide the resentments that arise when they face abuse. During the process of mediation, a woman is vulnerable to threats and harassment and is under extreme stress and pressure, yet the reconciliation procedure does not consider these facts. Mediation overlooks legal entitlements and ends up denying justice to women who have less bargaining power and cannot negotiate.

Another choice offered is ‘settlement’, where a victim is left with no other alternative but to fend for herself and her children instead of a meager amount of money, if any, offered by the violent husband, or she may stay at her maika or remarry. Therefore, these so-called ‘women-friendly’ adjudication spaces failed to address the concerns of the victims of violence. In other words, these courts are ‘family-centric’ rather than ‘victim- or survivor-centric’.

This approach rejects the notion of making survivors economically self-sufficient or offering options to lend socio-economic support to victims. The patriarchal imagination failed to provide distributive justice or material relief and support to the abused wives through a single-window mechanism, despite the knowledge that a comprehensive rehabilitative package is essential to remedy the situation of violence. The bold notion of challenging male dominance while improving the status of women or providing innovative solutions aiding survivors has not been imagined as an alternative by the state or society.

For more details, see my book Women and Domestic Violence Law in India: A Quest for Justice, 2019, Routledge

p 59-60