The Red Badge of Honour

The Beauty Inside is the last of a series of plays that I have been writing about. Catherine Filloux has based her play on a real life account of a victim of the tradition of honour killing in Turkey. Yalova is a 14 year old village girl who has been raped by a neighbour and consequently has become pregnant. Her family kills off the man and throws her into a canal to die. But she survives and fights back. Her case is taken up by Devrim, a female lawyer hailing from a rich and educated family of Istanbul. The play traces how Yalova helped by Devrim, defies all odds of family and society to give birth to her daughter in whom we see the prospect of a better future. However it is not a clear victory of right over wrong for as Devrim’s father tells her, the judicial system has merely used Yalova’s case to whitewash the country’s human rights record in front of the UN.

The play has a number of interwoven themes ranging from the conflict between the different value systems of the urban rich and the rural poor, the trauma that the victim’s family has to go through to corrupt contractors building flimsy houses which come crashing down during the earthquake. But at the heart of the play is the grave injustice done to a young girl–first she is repeatedly raped and silenced by a death threat and then when her family finds out they try to kill her to save their honour. How can ‘honour’ be at the root of such a heinous crime?

The word honour goes back to the beginning of civilization when society was in its rudimentary stage torn apart by the constant struggle to survive. Then it was honour that made men aspire to something higher and nobler, an ideal to be striven toward, in short it brought out the best in men. But with time, like every other good thing that has been abused, the concept of honour too came to be much abused. Today it has become representative of all things repressive in society and is binding upon us. And an extreme case is Yalova’s. Filloux has beautifully described the rape in symbolic terms by making it coincide with a solar eclipse. This is based on reality since Filloux was there in Turkey in 1999 when there was a total solar eclipse as well as an earthquake. For those few moments the day turns night–symbolizing an inversion of everything that is right and good. It is as if the entire cosmic order is mourning and protesting her rape by blocking out all the light in the world. If that is the case then how can her family try to punish her for the unnatural crime committed against her? It defies all logic! It seems as if man is capable of inexplicable cruelty. In the play Yalova’s family members are not depicted as unidimensional villains but as hapless victims of social ostracism. Thus some societies not only justify honour killing but also glorify it by saying that the death acts as a ritual cleansing of what is impure and unnatural. This interestingly reminds me of Stephen Crane’s war novel The Red Badge of Courage where the red badge is the wound received in war, a symbol of courage and valour. Here paradoxically the red badge of honour is intended for those who murder innocent victims like Yalova and bring glory to their clan. It seems as if something is rotten deep within our social foundation and it is finding expression in such bizarre but quite frequent incidents. Women are particularly vulnerable since honour be it of the family, caste or tribe is inseparably associated with them. While these stereotypes have been created by men, women too have contributed in nurturing them.

What is cause for worry is that incidents of honour killing are alarmingly frequent in India what with our rigid caste and religious divides. I am perhaps despairing but I cannot see the situation improving given how deep-seated the mistaken notion of honour lies. Till then we shall be occasionally encouraged by the likes of Yalova acting like a shining beacon of the little courage, bravery and right left in this world.