Intimate Public Spaces: Policing "Domestic Cruelty" in Women's Cells, Delhi

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, 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 Though