Mukhtar Mai’s ordinariness gives her story its poignancy

Mukhtar Mai’s memoir is an account of her manipulation by a feudal structure that used her gender to settle scores, writes Vrinda Nabar

In the Name Of Honor: A Memoir
Mukhtar Mai with Marie-Therese Cuny

Mukhtar Mai’s story hit the headlines about four years ago. Gang-raped by the powerful Mastoi clan in Meerwala, a remote Pakistani village, this illiterate woman went public with her story, seeking seek legal redress and challenging accepted, gender-circumscribed, sub-continental notions of honour.

Mukhtar Mai’s tenacity and the resultant global outrage made a cover-up difficult. She was able to have her attackers sentenced and set up a school for girls with the compensation money she received from the government. She is determined that her gender should not pay the price she nearly did for being unable to read the recorded statement to which she affixed her thumb-print: “knowledge must be given to girls, and as soon as possible, before their mothers bring them up the same way they were raised themselves.”

This memoir is the account of Mukhtar Mai’s manipulation by a feudal structure that used her gender to settle scores: a gang rape to assert clan supremacy, the rape of a woman to vindicate the alleged violation of another’s modesty. On the night she was raped, Mukhtar Mai believed she was on her way to plead her younger brother’s case and absolve him of the charge of molesting a Mastoi woman. She had no idea that the verdict was out, that the Mastoi-dominated jirga had already determined her fate, and that neither the village mullah nor the Koran she carried to protect her had any hold over the minds of the men who would rape her.

The awareness that her brother whom the Mastois had tortured and sodomised was still in danger catalysed a traumatised Mukhtar Mai’s decision to see her rapists convicted. Her protracted journey was not without its frustrations. She had to fight the Lahore High Court acquittal of the guilty, have her conduct and morals questioned, and travel long days to gather support for her cause, repeating her story to whoever would listen. Her experience only confirmed that what had happened was not singular: “Whatever the pretext — divorce, supposed adultery, or a settling of accounts among men — women pay the heaviest price… It is always a question of honour…”

The ways in which codes of honour and revenge are played out on the bodies of women are depressingly familiar throughout the subcontinent. Mukhtar Mai’s memoir lists other instances and, nearer home, Maya Tyagi, Bhanwari Devi, Rameezabee, the stories of the Gujarat mayhem and of “justice” delivered by local panchayats are part of the same sordid saga. 

Mukhtar Mai’s story was told to Marie-Therese Cuny, a collaboration facilitated by two translators. It is a moving story and the way she rose above what was done to her make her an exceptional woman. Her own voice comes through unmistakable and clear when she speaks of the night of her betrayal. Her encounters with authority, her scepticism when first offered financial aid, her tense ordeal during the legal battle all carry the mark of a woman who shook off her shame at being raped to save her cornered brother and knew in that moment that she was “no longer afraid of anything”.

But she is also the woman who can react characteristically to Salma, the Mastoi woman her brother allegedly molested: “Girls are supposed to keep their eyes modestly downcast, but Salma — she does whatever she wants. She’s not afraid of being looked at, and she even makes sure that she is!”

This human response is as much a part of Mukhtar Mai as her heroism. She remains an ordinary woman and it is her ordinariness that paradoxically gives her story its poignancy — something the narrative voice fails to convey.

The fallout of this flawed approach is apparent in Nicholas D Kristoff’s otherwise incisive Foreword. Kristoff somewhat shortsightedly sees the memoir as a “story that is tremendously inspiring rather than one that tells of brutality and despair” and Mukhtar Mai as “leading a revolution — against rape, illiteracy and the repression of women — that is reverberating through all of Pakistan and indeed the entire world.” He even concludes that “Mukhtar Mai has taken a sordid tale of gang rape and turned it into something heartwarming and hopeful.”

It is doubtful whether Mukhtar Mai would see it that way. Hers is an individual’s story and it was important, given its obviously foreign readership, to not stereotype or Orientalise either its positives or its negatives. There are moments in the memoir when the narrative voice comes close to doing that, in the process losing sight of the larger reality where atrocities continue though not all women may be victims of gang rapes or “honour” vendettas. In spite of Mukhtar Mai’s relative triumph the prospect for many women in the rest of the subcontinent is far from sanguine.

The writer is former head, department of English, University of Mumbai.