Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India. By Pratiksha Baxi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 434 pp. ₹1,150.00, $59.95, cloth.

Abstract

Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India. By Pratiksha Baxi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. 434 pp. 1,150.00, $59.95, cloth.In the aftermath of the brutal gang rape in Delhi in 2012 and the international scrutiny of Indian rape culture that followed, protests against sexual violence quickly turned to the law as the primary site of reform. But what are the possibilities and limits of law in addressing the issue of sexual violence in India today? In its detailed analysis of rape cases, forensic medical practice, and the working of criminal courts, Pratiksha Baxi's Public Secrets of Law is a remarkable study of the life of rape in Indian trial courts. As one of the first comprehensive studies of the working of criminal courts in contemporary India, Public Secrets of Law gives critical insights about the nature of the Indian criminal court that extend beyond cases of rape. The detailed ethnography demonstrates the contingent and highly subjective process of decision making by legal authorities in the adjudication of rape cases in local courts. She marks through her case studies the highly performative nature of power in courts in India today.The introduction situates her study in relation to comparative ethnographic work on the law and a growing critical literature on law in postcolonial India. Baxi argues that the rape trials reinforce deeply violent phallocentric notions of 'justice' in a performance of the public secret of rape in Indian trial courts. Baxi's study is based on extensive archival and ethnographic work conducted in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat from the late 1990s. The location of Baxi's study is key, the highly volatile city of Ahmedabad, defined by communal violence in 1992 and 2002 that resulted in horrific acts of sexual violence committed against minority communities in Gujarat. Baxi's introduction incorporates her own experiences of patriarchal hierarchy, sexual harassment, and even her violation at the hands of a judge, who describes how women's bodies ask for sexual violation by becoming physically aroused. Through this dialogue, Baxi reveals how danger and fear pervaded her ethnographic work. The judge expressed sexual excitement in his enactment of the rape narrative to Baxi and implied that he himself was aroused by the facts of violated women's bodies.In the second chapter, Baxi focuses on the medicalization of victim's bodies and the way norms of forensic evidence medicalize consent and falsity. She critically examines the deployment of the two-finger in case law, a from the British colonial period where medical doctors test the elasticity of the victim's vagina to determine a woman's habituation to sexual intercourse. Medical jurisprudence in India imagines the victim's body as the primary site of truth, where evidence on the body reveals the possibility of the truth of sexual violence. Baxi demonstrates how medico-legal evidence becomes a primary mode through which the defense cross-examines victims and reinforces the idea that women in India often bring false charges of rape.Throughout her study, Baxi is acutely conscious of the vulnerability of victims who declare acts of sexual violence and seek recourse in the law. In Chapter Three, she emphasizes how the question of childhood is key in the determination of the truth of rape, where courts sexualize children and force children to testify to sexual violence in language that inscribes blame on the body of the child. The ethnography attends to the effects of this declaration, marking, for example, the profound meanings of the complaint in Gujarati, fariyad [literally, an appeal], a cry of pain or the naming of a violation. …