‘All cases are false’: law, gendered violence, and the politics of thickening in Himalayan India

Abstract

This article focuses on Indian women's experiences of filing complaints of gendered violence in order to address two interconnected questions: how are complaints of gendered and sexual violence authenticated as genuine or rejected as dubious before they even reach a courtroom? And how do women who bring these complaints before the law navigate a social field in which what counts as the ‘truth’ might conflict with their own understandings and experiences? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, this article explores how family, community, and local state officials engaged in a kind of thick description that contextualized women's complaints within rural social relations and political economy. It shows how this politics of thickening often displaced women's individual experiences of violence and served to falsify their complaints. This everyday thickening bears a troubling similarity to the theory and methods of feminist activists and anthropologists, necessitating reflection on how to write ethically about gendered violence without replicating violence. Finally, this article turns attention to how some women decided to take on this politics of thickening through canny adoption of its methods and premises, eventually stretching the limits of the law and unintentionally expanding its scope.