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Virginity And Honor In The Epic The Mahabharata

1441 Words6 Pages

A girl child when born has an indispensible stigma attached to her body and that stigma is the stigma of honour. The unit of measurement of her character is the purity of her body. And thus, every crime and violence directed against the body of a girl is somewhere associated with the stigma of honour. This honour stigma plays a key role in the objectification of women too. This paper explores how this honour stigma is the chief cause of gender based violence and gender-related crimes and how literature has been misinterpreted to support it. Main Paper A Post-Colonial Feminist Analysis of the concept of Virginity and Honour in the Epic the Mahabharata to De-stigmatize the Honour and Honour Based Crimes Most girls in South Asia are born with the invisible yet …show more content…

Communities have celebrations marking this event as a control over woman’s sexuality. As defined by World Health Organisation, FGM includes all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons. According to United Nation’s Population Fund (UNPF), breast ironing is the one of the five under-reported crimes relating to gender-based Violence along with “bride napping”, traumatic fistula, femicide and child marriage prevalent in South Asian countries. It’s the brutal flattening of a Young Girl’s developing chest to protect her from rape and sexual harassment. It is believed that if the breasts would be flattened, the girls would appear less feminine and attractive. The following recent reports from the news agencies clearly show how frequent are the crimes relating to honour as they have their roots in many other crimes too: 1. “A lady was gang-raped for voting for a candidate that culprits were not

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