By Ipshita Sarkar
India, thou art a mausoleum of unuttered shrieks. Each dawn, a palimpsest renewed in crimson, where the surgeon’s daughter, weary of her thirty hours of vigil, is laid upon the altar of her own vocation, and the scalpel, once consecrated to healing, becomes the obscene instrument of her unmaking. In Assam’s pastoral dusk, a girl of fourteen years is dragged from the modest sanctuary of her studies, her body abandoned beside stagnant waters, Her innocence dispersed like reeds broken by indifferent wind. Varanasi, city of sacred confl agrations, becomes the theatre of another sacrilege: a young woman drugged, her image captured, Her silence was auctioned in the marketplace of extortion. And in the tribal belts of Madhya Pradesh, where earth itself is ancient and unappeased, Twenty women a day are harvested as statistics. Their names transfi gured into bureaucratic ash before justice dares to breathe their syllables. The violence is not an event but an epoch.
A geography is the human body. In its aftermath, the architecture of families was dismantled. Mothers pace beneath ceilings that drip insomnia, Fathers calcify into monuments of mute humiliation, Siblings inherit nightmares like clandestine dowries. while the victim herself becomes a palimpsest of scars, Her very marrow remembering hands it did not summon. The courtroom, supposed crucible of justice, enacts instead the slow pornography of doubt: “Why did you not scream? Why did you not resist?” As if survival itself were betrayal. Consent, dissected into pedantic syllables, is made to evaporate beneath the sterile grammar of law. Each adjournment is another wound. Each loophole is another grave dug in language. Meanwhile, the republic rehearses its catechism of blame: Her hour of return, her garment, her laughter, her freedom. Shame is transferred like a hereditary curse.
A mother’s bequest to her daughter: Walk swiftly, speak sparingly, and distrust the night. Thus, vigilance itself becomes the sole inheritance of girlhood. Yet in fi ssures of despair, resistance germinates: doctors marching for sanctuaries unsullied, families who refuse the bribe of silence, girls who dare to name their violators, fragile fl ames defying the architecture of erasure. And still the arithmetic persists: Statistics accumulating like skulls in catacombs, Verdicts suspended until memory itself corrodes.
Therefore, let poetry assume the offi ce of gravestone, each line an indictment, each stanza an autopsy, until the conscience of the state is pierced. For every digit in the ledger is a mutilated biography. Every headline is a severed lullaby. This is the republic’s true anthem not sung but shrieked, not orchestrated but endured, a hymn of marrow and desecration, reminding us that to forget is complicity, And that silence, too, is rape.