In India, marital rape is a crime that the law refuses to acknowledge. Hearing the voices of victim/survivors across class, caste and geography, this story traces the British colonial roots of the legal system that fails to criminalise rape within marriage, leaving lasting damage and stripping thousands of women of justice.
Content warning: this story contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault.
Ten o’clock on an autumn night, tepid, clammy. My phone lights up – and buzzes, intermittently, every two seconds. I spy Smita’s* number in the notifications and breathe easy – the easiness of intimacy, of having one’s routine down pat across nine years. Within seconds, the easiness is splintered.
Smita has sent two telling photographs of herself, along with an audio message on WhatsApp to say that her husband has raped her. The message, in Hindi, is distraught – but it is also resigned. I know why.
Unless she were to file a First Information Report (FIR – an initial complaint with the police in India that precedes an investigation) under the civil statute of India’s penal code and make peace with her husband not being tried for rape, there’s nothing she can do.
I understand the resignation Smita feels, forced to juxtapose this feeling of abject helplessness against the fiery charge with which she had gone after her first rapist nine years ago. That was when I first met her.
Set up to interview Smita by a non-profit organisation which she had approached for help after a man she had dated raped her, I was instantly struck by her resolve.
“I will not let him go,” she pronounced, over and over, in a series of interviews the NGO organised in 2016, “I want to take him to court – I want him punished.”
Even as the travails of the case wore on and the laggardness of the Indian justice system began to deflate her, our friendship grew stronger.
Despite the “character assassination” in a Delhi courtroom – a “sordid tradition” many feminists believe, where “scandalous” questions by a defence team seeking to poke holes in a survivor’s testimony are commonplace – Smita bore it all.
“The fact that I know I have been able to cause him jail time,” she said, “however little [the accused was later released on bail, pre-trial], made me happy.”
Since 2017 (when hearings in the case first began), Smita watched as the trial stretched across the years, hearings trickling down to one or two a year, until, in 2022, she finally decided to retract her court-registered statement and claim her original police complaint to be false.
The sessions court consequently found the accused not guilty for lack of evidence. When I asked her why she did it, she claimed it was because she could no longer go on after “five years of nothing”.
“I was too lonely,” she said, reiterating how – through that time – her father, a lower-middle class government worker, had continued to oppose the case and her mother had continued to disbelieve her. Smita had had no support, she said, instead facing intense pressure from family and neighbours to get married to end the stigma.
Eventually, she agreed to marry the man her extended family chose for her. She told me he knew nothing of the rape. They set up house in a dusty back alley in northwest Delhi and had a daughter together.
In 2025, then, with a three-year-old in tow and phone calls to her parents resulting in their reportedly obstinate reiterations of “woh achha ladka hai” (he’s a good man), Smita began to look for recourse.
“Papa has made it clear that there is no way home,” she says. “Once, I left my cellphone recorder on, as he railed at me and slapped me. I sent them the recording, and they told me to adjust. They asked if I had done something wrong for him to act that way. “They say, after being raped by a boyfriend, I should be happy I’m now married and ‘settled’.”
And what about the fact that her husband now rapes her? “They don’t believe it,” says Smita flatly.
“Husbands don’t rape, my mother says. ‘Whatever’s happening, keep it between the two of you’”.
Smita’s experience, sadly, is borne out by Monika Tiwary, coordinator and counsellor at the Crisis Intervention Centre of Shakti Shalini – an NGO for sexual violence survivors in New Delhi:
“In the many years that I’ve had marital rape survivors approach me for help, I’ve never actually heard them use the terms ‘marital rape’, or distinctly articulating, ‘my husband raped me’. It’s like, they don’t have that vocabulary.
“Instead, you piece together what has happened through the storytelling. They’ll tell me, ‘he gets drunk and beats me, or forces me to watch porn – and then this thing forcefully happens. Or, they’ll say, things were done to me that I did not consent to…what can I do?”
The British Empire brought a marital rape “exception” India now refuses to abolish
Tiwary’s summary speaks to both the lack of legal vocabulary as well as the country’s socio-cultural dismissiveness around marital rape.
Despite being the world’s purported largest democracy, and a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) –which includes marital rape – India does not have a law that criminalises rape in marriage.
The Indian Constitution has been read multiple times by the Supreme Court, as making no distinction “between the rights of married and unmarried women” when it comes to the right to privacy and “making decisions of sexual or procreative nature”. But this is at complete odds with the Indian Penal Code (the IPC) which, established in 1860 under British colonialism, is the main criminal code of India that outlines offences and corresponding punishments. The IPC defines rape – and includes an exception: “Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife… is not rape.”
How did this contradiction come to be – and in the absence of legal nomenclature that speaks for them, how might the Indian women facing marital rape be deemed full citizens?
“Criminalising marital rape ‘threatens the institution of marriage’”
India’s Hindu right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which forms the government, has attempted to take a “cultural” stance on the matter. In 2015, a minister claimed that the “international concept of marital rape” could not be applied to India which treated marriage “as a sacrament”. Removing the marital rape “exception”, the government has insisted, will “threaten the institution of marriage”.
They have, instead, pointed towards the country’s extant Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act as a failsafe. But that Act considers marital rape a civil offence, not a criminal one which means “no arrests can be made based on a complaint filed under [it].”
Despite these lofty paeans to culture, the origins of this exception are actually British. The IPC is the longest-serving criminal code in the common law world today. (Common law originated in England and is the basis for most modern legal systems in the world.)
Enacted during Britain’s colonisation of India, the IPC was influenced heavily by Justice William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which stated: “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband”.
Perhaps it is that conflict between a “foreign” past (and terminology) vis-à-vis a present that refuses to find new terms for a crime it denies, that causes India’s marital rape survivors’ stories to languish.
English continues to be perceived as a language of sexual modernity within India’s middle classes, despite the 22 scheduled and hundreds of “unscheduled” languages under the Indian Constitution.
English is also the official language used in India’s higher courts. What words, then, might survivors across lower socio-economic demographics use to communicate trauma, when things like genital parts or sexual activities are couched in euphemisms in other Indian languages?
Community activists bridging the legal abyss
In Bhavnagar, a western Indian city renowned for its salt production, I am shown around by SNEHA Foundation, an NGO that works to uplift women and children from underprivileged communities.
Gurpritsingh Gill, its 38-year-old founder, is particularly empathetic to the shanty women who come looking for him to relay stories of violence. He has attempted to intervene more than once, he says, but a volte-face is common.
Urmi (centre in printed kurta) with some of the activists at SNEHA. Founder Gurpritsingh Gill stands on the extreme left.
“Once, Usha* ben [ben is “sister”, a suffix commonly used in Gujarati] told me she was being raped at home,” Gill says. “She didn’t say it just like that, but I knew. We all knew.
“Her face was bleeding one time when I went to see her – she wanted a divorce, she cried. When I went back the next day with another coordinator, she had changed her mind.”
The labyrinthine slum corridors that Gill’s team moves around in, are more abjectly poor than Smita’s ecosystem. Here, there are no easy inroads to the law or the police, no words for marital rape, and yet no way to mask signs of rape from neighbours.
Latika* ben talks about it with me, freely. Yes, her husband can be a violent man, he has an extramarital affair with a younger woman, she tells me readily. Certain nights, if he hasn’t been able to make his dalliance, he will return home to beat her – then rape her.
Early on, she had attempted to stage a protest, shriek, etc. – says Latika ben – not anymore: not since he smashed a glass in her face and told her, her body was his for the taking, that she should just lie down “and take it”.
We talk for a long, long time, days even, interspersing dark conversation with light walks around her slum where pigtailed adolescent girls keep time with our footsteps, I ask her if she recognised it was rape immediately. She hesitates – she doesn’t have a stolid response: “What can I do? He is my husband.”
Back in New Delhi, sexual violence survivor counsellor Monika Tiwary theorises that perhaps, women from more disadvantaged communities are willing to seek help because: “they feel they have nothing to lose. They’ll tell me, ‘the walls are very thin, the house is very small, so anyway when the abuse is happening, the whole street knows’.”
Tiwary says: “The women who approach us –there are no social luxuries they will lose – so, why wouldn’t they (talk about it)?”
Tiwary juxtaposes this against a purported reluctance to report that she witnesses among a more dominant-caste-and-class strata of women: “They might have more resources at their disposal to do something with – but that also means that they have more to lose.
“You’re restricted by name, shame, family honour…ideas that are thrust upon you. So, while it might be easier for you to access a legal expert, you also risk everything going away.”
If demographic differences are thrown into the proverbial ring as a possible detractor against speaking up, the fear of social dispossession – of utter and abject family abandonment – is another.
“I’ve seen, firsthand, just what a little bit of encouragement can do,” says Gurpritsingh Gill.
Gill runs a primary school under the aegis of his NGO, where children from neighbouring slums study, most staying back for one-on-one tutoring. He says: “We’ve had children here from broken homes – where violent fathers perpetrate abuse against hapless mothers in every home around them.
“At a celebratory ceremony recently in school, when the children gathered around cake, one of the young girls burst out crying. We asked her what had happened, and she said she didn’t want to go back home – that she only saw her mother being beaten up by her father, by her grandparents. It’s what she sees.
“Our goal, through education here, is to create a safe space – so that, even if the mother refuses help, her daughter might grow up to craft a more equitable space.”
From one demographic to another
On the other end of the spectrum from the women in Bhavnagar’s slums – and from Smita, too – is Mallika*, who I speak to, with oceans between us, on pixelated screens.
Mallika is in Barcelona, Spain – and has been, for the past three years, attempting to run her own yoga studio from the ground. She’s been teaching (mostly) Spaniards the art of pirouetting bodies into inextricable asanas, she laughs, as she finishes documentation to work full-time in her new country. Parental disownership has kept her far from her old home, Jamshedpur, eastern India.
“Eight years ago, I married a man I barely knew because my parents thought it was time. Within a year, I was lying in our shared bed, metal screws through my leg post-surgery – completely vulnerable – while my husband mounted on top, irate at something I had done…refusing to hear my ‘no’s. After it happened, I disassociated.”
Mallika wanted to take him to court, she says, and did her research – but, “legally, there was nothing to be done”; instead, her rapist walked free, with only the civil complaint she could file against him for “domestic violence” under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (it merely restrained him from having contact with her, and ordered monetary relief), and a divorce. Her abandonment began, then.
Mallika tells me: “My father is a very well-known businessman…in Jamshedpur. He’s well-known in his circles.” In the absence of criminal recourse, divorce was her only way out, and she speaks of the “disrepute” this garnered in the town: “They said, what a shame that she is back home, she is divorced.”
And while her father puzzled over the concept of marital rape – and has, in the years since, still refused to comprehend it – he “defended” her to a faceless public with the claim that she was, at least, economically fit and working for a living.
To her businessman father, Mallika had failed maritally – but at least, she had not failed to “produce”. That is, she continued to make money.
This monied bravado, however, has not managed to bridge the distance that has opened up between Mallika and her parents – and that has, inadvertently, caused her to self-exile, thousands of miles away.
“Starting my life anew!” she announces gaily on our WhatsApp call. Yet, it is obvious, that even in the more privileged echelons of society that she has been raised in, Mallika – facing familial consternation – has been forced to leave, “making,” as she calls it, “[her] peace with it”.
When family becomes refuge
In the absence of legal nomenclature or governmental support, familial refuge might be an essential bulwark that India’s marital rape survivors need. Giselle, whom I meet in Pune, acquiesces, calling herself “very, very lucky” to have a “supportive” family. “I come from a very liberal, very progressive family, where culturally, I was never stopped from doing anything.”
Born in an Anglo-Indian family that, she says, was not very well off but had sufficient educational and class privilege (English was their lingua franca), Giselle met the man she would eventually marry, at the age of 21. He was legally blind.
“He hadn’t been born blind,” she says, “but his glaucoma led to blindness. When we met, he’d already lost his vision.” Giselle says they hit it off because he insisted on being treated no differently, and she agreed.
The problems in the marriage emerged early, she claims – right after they began cohabiting, when his expectations of her became patriarchal.
“He expected hot meals after work daily, when I’d been working too, and for me to fetch him things the second he asked. And then, there was the anger. He’d smash stuff daily if he was irritated with me, and – he didn’t actually hit me – but would stand over me threateningly (he was much larger) and yell at me.”
“Once, we had an argument and I decided to leave in the car, but he caught up with me and then, began to bang on all the doors and windows incessantly till I opened up. It took me a while to realise I was scared of him.”
Sex was hard, Giselle says, because when she started sleeping with her husband, “it hadn’t been very often before – with others. It was painful.”
When she would articulate the pain to him, she says, “it just made him impatient.”
When Giselle’s husband raped her, her immediate response, she tells me, was to cry, without making a sound. She calls it her “survival instinct” to not “piss him off more”.
She says: “The next morning, I just got up and went to the kitchen and made breakfast. Like every other day.”
When the episodic emotional abuse piled up, culminating in one exactingly violent night, Giselle says she chose to leave the home – and finally, tell her parents. “I knew I had supportive parents, but I knew what they would say. My mother, for instance, wasn’t sure if I should give up on the marriage. ‘You might change your mind after some time, and go back” she’d suggest – and we’d argue – they didn’t know the full extent of the sexual violence.”
In Giselle’s words, the sexual violence wasn’t fully actualised until years later when she saw a scene in a Hindi movie that depicted marital rape eerily similar to hers, and she spiralled: “After, I began to use the word ‘rape’ to describe what I’d gone through to a friend – who suggested I see a therapist”.
A specialist in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing – a type of psychotherapy that helps people recover from trauma) finally helped her to piece the experiences together. It’s taken her a while, Giselle says, but she’s “not going to be quiet about it”.
She says: “I told my parents a year or two before I lost my dad [to COVID in 2021]. My mother was horrified for me, but supports me. I do wish I could have done something – legally – that he wasn’t just roaming scot-free. Instead, I now have a PTSD diagnosis atop the depression I’ve always had.”
Giselle says she actually saw her ex-husband two years ago, in 2023, at a meetup for singles in Pune: she walked out, triggered and disassociated, needing to use therapeutic strategies to push past fear.
What might daily life look like for a survivor who’s unencumbered by the space that marital rape throws her into? For a survivor like Giselle who lives with the knowledge her rapist inhabits the same city as her, fully capable of bumping into her again? For Smita, who’s desperately seeking means to change the geography she shares with her rapist, scrabbling for a home that can’t and won’t be her parents? For Usha or Latika ben who continue to share tiny spaces of violence and daily life with men they’re resigned to being with – determined to avoid choices like Smita’s, since judiciary and state look the other way?
The politicians and lawyers blocking India’s marital rape law reform
Currently, India stands on the verge of a precipice with multiple petitions knocking on the doors of the judiciary that challenge the “marital rape exception” under the IPC’s Section 375 that defines rape.
An NGO called the RIT Foundation, for instance, was one of the pioneers, filing what is called a Public Interest Litigation in 2015.
However, in 2022 a split verdict was reached in Delhi High Court – with one judge calling the claim “judicial overreach”, while another critiqued the unconstitutionality of the exception.
In a more recent hearing, in 2024 – where India’s Supreme Court chose to club together all petitions asking for the criminalisation of marital rape, and demanded the central government answer why it hadn’t struck down the “exception”, the government used its failsafe response of “wanting to avoid possible conjugal disturbances” – and said that it would need to undertake a “comprehensive approach”.
The government’s opposition to criminalising marital rape isn’t new and, unfortunately, didn’t even begin with the BJP in power.
In 2013, just months after the gruesome rape and murder of a 23-year-old student on a Delhi bus that caused shock waves and tumultuous protest in the country, a three-member committee was created to recommend amendments in the then-rape laws, to the coalition government in power (helmed by the “more liberal” Congress party). One of those changes included removing the marital rape recommendation.
Read More: When rape sparks protest: Turning points in India’s history, or history repeating itself?
However, while the government brought most of those amendments into ordinance, it rejected the suggestion to criminalise marital rape, stating that it “would lead to false accusations of rape”.
This merely continued with the BJP when they came to power in 2014. In 2015, after a BJP minister argued that marital rape was “an international concept” that “could not be applied to Indian context(s)”, a second minister – in 2016 – doubled down on the party’s stance, parroting the same statement.
In 2022, a woman minister of the BJP – who was then the Minister for Women and Child Development – insisted that it would “not be right” to “condemn every man in this country as a rapist”. And last year, the country’s law minister prevaricated on the matter, terming it a “social issue” rather than a “legal” one.
The general murmur against legalisation has been the supposed protections already offered by two sections of the law: one that criminalises “cruelty” of a husband towards a wife (punishable by three years), and another that deals with violence against women in any “domestic relationship”.
However, the latter is a civil act, not a criminal one, where the accused rapist may not be prosecuted by the state or imprisoned. For the former, the threshold for what counts as “cruelty” has usually been treated as high, and the “proving” of rape difficult against the all-encompassing marital rape exception of the IPC, left by the British, that refuses to bow out.
Further challenges arrive with the growing wave of India’s men’s rights activists (MRAs) and online trolls who’ve denounced the movement and warned of “misuse” by women.
Activist Chitra Awasthi, founder of RIT Foundation, counters this by arguing that every law has the potential for misuse:
“Has no one ever filed a case under 302 [the IPC section that prescribes punishment for murder] that is, then, found invalid? That’s the purpose of the legal system.”
Tiwary concurs and points to the “thousands of loopholes” that exist in “any law”.
“The demands of a marginalised group who want equity are always met with the argument of misuse,” she says. “What we need is proper sensitisation of people to calling marital rape ‘rape’.
Also, the debate of this being against ‘our culture’ needs to end. How did something that has come down to us from colonialism get co-opted this way?”
India’s marital rape law activists drive grassroots change
Tiwary calls for change at “a cultural and social level”, wrought by education – specifically sex education that teaches boys the “potential victim’s perspective. That conversation – about the woman’s autonomy – needs to be taught to male children.”
Gill, operating out of his modest offices amidst the slums of Bhavnagar, appears to be doing just that.
“We believe that the way to achieve macro change is through a micro unit: that micro unit is educating the children of these slums who grow up witnessing violence. They’d tell us, how can we study when there’s nothing to eat? So we’d say, ok, here’s some ration to take home for the household. Money is never offered because in a violent household, the father might use it to buy local liquor.”
SNEHA Foundation also invites gynaecologists into the fray who might, in addition to education, conduct free health checks on the kids and proffer valuable bodily knowledge. They also offer sanitary pads to young girls who might otherwise not have access to them at home and, therefore, drop out of school.
Urmi (centre) with two women case workers of SNEHA Foundation
Gill says: “We work from the bottom to make our way to the top. Someday, perhaps, this cycle of toxic masculinity will end.”
One of his strategies is “putting back” into the community. He says: “Many of our fieldworkers who counsel both women who are survivors, and children, were once our students. They grew up in the slums, they have people there. We involve them as much as possible.”
But as intrepid on-the-ground campaigns to dismantle marital rape are mounted, what of the part of the executive and judiciary?
A citizen denied a guaranteed fundamental right because of a colonial-era “exception” can only be deemed a half-citizen, and it is past time for independent India to set this right.
*The names of all survivors and their family members have been changed to protect privacy.
All art by Lacuna artist Wong Yan Yee.
