Saying The Unsayable?

No society approves of abuse. And yet, it exists in every culture. Not only that, society seems to need abuse as an institution, otherwise, it wouldn’t be so universal and timeless. Interestingly, there isn’t too much inventiveness when it comes to the people mentioned in these abuses. Mothers, and in India sisters, become the butt of so many of them. Arguing, as was recently done, that abuse is ‘against culture’ is almost precisely wrong.

Abuse arises only from culture. No young person has learnt these words from Instagram. They have picked them up from their parents’ generation, from walking around in the street, from overhearing older people talk. Abuse always originates from within and is, ironically, a map of what a culture holds to be most precious. And what a culture places at the pinnacle of what it finds worth profaning tells us a story.

Medieval Christendom’s worst oaths had to do with blasphemy because God sat at the centre of what could not be touched. In India too, we show a great deal of sensitivity to any perceived slur involving God. But the most common abuses across languages, from Hindi to Russian to Arabic to English itself, return repeatedly to the same motif: a slur directed at female relatives, particularly the mother. There is a reason societies gravitate to this.

Every society places some relationships beyond the ambit of desire. Civilisation is built on the idea of certain things being taboo. And an accusation involving a sexual relationship between forbidden figures like the mother and sister is not just an insult; it is a violation that is foundational.

It is what leads society to locate desire outwards rather than inwards and enables the formation of alliances, obligation and society itself. This is why cultures that might be very different otherwise agree on this. Abuse has, over time, evolved other functions. It is used for emphasis, to accentuate a point. Something is effing great or effing boring.

It is also used as punctuation, to hold a sentence together. One can overhear conversations that are essentially a string of abuses peppered with some normal words. And then, of course, an expletive is sometimes used as a sign of admiration. Someone can be a shrewd so-and-so. In all these cases the profane is domesticated in a way that doesn’t cause offence. Between friends it is a sign that the relationship is strong enough to survive its use.

Age is a potent source of hierarchy but not more so than gender. Abuse was always meant to be channelled through women, not by them. Mothers and sisters were the fodder men used to wage their verbal battles with each other, to protect their egos. Women were the currency of abuse, never their source

It is, in fact, a certificate of closeness. There are two dimensions to the phenomenon of abuse — the words themselves and the manner of their use. The first is cultural in nature. This decides what is deemed too sacred to speak ill of. That is why cultures pick the same set of figures— gods, mothers, sisters. The other dimension is social. That decides who has the permission to use the abuse. Not just ‘what is said’ but ‘who said it to whom’.

The latter is what explains why many people would flinch on seeing a fifteenyear-old girl direct these kinds of words at the seventy-five-year-old Prime Minister of the country. Even to people who are not supporters of govt, there is a sense that a line has been crossed. Something fundamental is being violated. When a young girl uses these words, she is doing much more than violating a norm. She is changing the rules of the game.

An arrangement that we had all tacitly accepted is suddenly being overturned. When abuse happens along the direction of hierarchy, it evokes comment but does not become a matter of national outrage. Men routinely abuse women on social media in the vilest terms; It is now seen as a matter of routine.

We have all seen videos of Noida aunties letting loose against their help. These are things we disapprove of as signs of bad behaviour, but it stops there. Arguably, that is one of the functions of abuse, one reason why it survives in societies. It provides a deterrent to overturning hierarchies. Abuses are never literally meant; their role is to act as a form of warning for people to know their place. In this particular instance, at least three kind of hierarchies were simultaneously violated— age, gender and power distance.

Age is a potent source of hierarchy but not more so than gender. Abuse was always meant to be channelled through women, not by them. Mothers and sisters were the fodder men used to wage their verbal battles with each other, to protect their egos. Women were the currency of abuse, never their source. This was embedded in the reaction to these words; he did not describe the protestors simply as citizens. He spoke of ‘our daughters’.

The phrase is not merely descriptive. It is rooted in the idea of paternal oversight. It locates an individual within a larger social order with clearly marked expectations and boundaries. The word comes with freight attached and harvests outrage effortlessly. Abuse that shows deference for more rooted hierarchies we can live with, but one that challenges those is difficult to accept.

Some hierarchies are just too deeply internalised. This is why even many people who are opposed to the govt found it inappropriate. Their political opinion told them one thing while social conditioning overruled that instinct. The source of the cultural shock was not so much the abuse, which is familiar. It was whose mouth it came out of, which is not.

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