No honour in murder

The Hindu

6 days ago

It has been one week since Kavin Selva Ganesh's parents — Chandrasekar and Tamilselvi — laid his brutally mutilated body to rest. Their grief transcends the screen in every video clip that surfaces online. Their 27-year-old son, an IT employee in Chennai, hailing from Arumugamangalam, a hamlet in Thoothookudi district, was allegedly murdered by his girlfriend's brother, Surjith, because Kavin belonged to the Devendra Kula Velalar or Pallar caste classified as a Scheduled Caste (SC) in India. Surjith belonged to the Most Backward Caste in a community classified as Mukkulathor caste group, who also go by Thevars.
'Honour' killings have become a common hate crime in Tamil Nadu with mounting instances of SC youth being hunted down and killed for having loved outside of their caste. While rooted in caste hatred, it is also rooted in deep-seated misogyny. An article in Economic and Political Weekly on June 28 speaks of how traditional marriage customs, rooted in caste endogamy, contribute to violence against couples who defy these norms. This is particular to Dalit men who marry or associate with women from other communities, especially Savarna women.
Dominant caste groups believe that women who love and marry, or in Kavin's case, intend to marry outside of their caste, are pollutants of caste purity. A woman's autonomy here is met with punitive measures. Lest we forget the terrible fate of Vimaladevi, a 20-year-old caste Hindu woman from Poothipuram village in Madurai district, who was found hanging from a tree in 2014 because she eloped with her lover, a Dalit youth, Dhilip Kumar. Her parents were allegedly involved in her murder. D. Suresh Kumar adds that there is a perception that caste killings happen only in villages. Women and men are not free of caste in cities too as demonstrated in this article in The Hindu.
For years now, activists have been demanding a law dealing exclusively with honour killings. Anti-caste activist A. Kathir, says that a group came up with a draft, titled The Freedom of Marriage and Association and Prohibition of Crimes in the Name of Honour Act, 2022. Despite the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam promising to honour the creation of the act, it is yet to see the light of day.
Based on the social media posts and video edits supporting Surjith from members of his caste, it is evident that this deep-rooted divide between caste groups and their inherent misogyny, in the land deemed 'progressive', will not die down. In a country that attempts to save the institution of marriage at all levels, even in courts, it is important to protect those who wish to marry outside of the shackles caste.
Toolkit
The Tamil Nadu government released State Policy for Transgender Persons 2025 on August 1. It is a five-year road map that promises education, and dignity with respect to self-identification without medical certification. Some of the most notable parts of the document include taking up the amending of the Hindu Succession Act, Indian Succession Act, among others, to ensure right of inheritance to transgender and intersex persons; and the provision of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis to prevent HIV transmission and the establishment of standardised clinical protocol to treat transgender people.
Wordsworth
Topside test: 'Are there two trans people in a story talking to each other about something other than medical transition?'
The Topside Test coined by author Torrey Peters' hopes to be a metric that answers this exact question, especially in the space of literature. Peters, who is trans herself, authored Stag Dance which was released in March 2025. While promoting her book in a podcast, the author said that a culture must evolve around speaking of trans ideas capturing the daily life of queer people instead of receiving sympathy from cisgender readers.
Ouch!
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Women we meet
Krupa Ge, a writer and translator, who brought out her book Burns Boy in July, has been working on intersectional literature since her first book River Remembers, a non-fiction on climate change, focussing on the Chennai floods of 2015. She says that as a woman and a mother, she has recently felt a shift in loyalty towards motherhood for obvious reasons.
'I was only an 'inheritor', a daughter, when I wrote What We Know About Her (her first fiction novel). When I finished Burns Boy, I was a mother myself. And to write about the mother in the book and the daughter Aparna was fun as well as cathartic having just experienced the violence of what Lucy Jones writes about in her beautiful book Matrescence,' she says.
She says that the world around her is difficult to witness. 'Being a mother is also to feel utterly helpless, watching these mothers of babies in Gaza, and the men risking their lives for flour and formula,' she says. Krupa has enjoyed translating women and is currently translating short fiction.