Dupattas and Ropes

A critical analysis of Hangwoman by K.R. Meera

“Hangwoman” by KR Meera. Penguin Random House. India, 2014

(Originally in Malayalam, translated by J. Devika)
Aadithri Shetty (21011055)

“It is not women who fear history; it is history who fears women. That’s why there are so few
of them in it” (189). “Hangwoman” portrays Chetna Grddha Mullick’s journey to becoming
the world’s first female executioner, thus continuing on the career path of most of the men in
her family line before her. The book showcases her journey from being subjugated as her
father’s daughter, to being the subjugated by the man she loved, to struggling to find a
balance between those two identities, and ends with her finally rejecting both those identities
to be an independent woman who makes her own choices without any external force of
influence. While following this storyline it discusses the idea of death in an extremely
peaceful but also powerful, almost poetic light. Alongside these main themes it also subtly
touches upon some important as well as controversial themes of tradition and culture, class
conflict, the bureaucracy of the government, capital punishment and sex work. The book
beautifully entwines the life stories of Chetna’s whole family line with what she is going
through at that moment, thereby describing her exact thoughts and emotions even better. It is
extremely well written and has the intended effect on the reader. The whole book gives the
reader a sense of ethereality and fantasy with its call backs to her family history and the
parallels it draws between her and her female ancestors, while sharply jerking the reader back
into reality with the experiences that she has as a modern Indian woman.

Feminism, sexuality and identity

The book is about the ground-breaking idea of a woman taking a career as an executioner. It
is seen as a job that only men can do, owing to women being emotionally weaker and having
a weaker sense of self and willpower. This, combined with women being seen as a sum of
their sexuality and maternal caring nature, furthers the patriarchal notion that women are not
capable of doing this job. Chetna is pushed towards this line of work by her father, who tells
her and the rest of society that she is more than capable of hanging criminals, but later in the
novel he reveals that he has no belief in her and was just capitalising on the controversy and
novelty of her contradicting the aforementioned stereotype (396-397). She gives into the
power dynamic of being the meek daughter of an Indian household at first. She then falls in
love with Sanjeev Kumar Mitra who manipulates her emotions with promises of marriage
and romance to achieve his goal of getting ahead in his career and unceremoniously dumps
her whenever she does not prove useful to his work. These two men seem to be opposing
forces in her life and at first, she rejects her father to follow Mitra, only to realize later that he
too has selfish intentions and is using her. The book ends with her accepting her own identity
and needs and growing into her own as a woman descending from a line of strong women,
with unique and beautiful stories, not being subjugated by the men in her life.
While the male forces in her life obviously oppose her sense of power, the women in her life
too are seen to resign to the helplessness of their gender. Her grandmother says, “If women
want to stand up straight, they should be willing to bend occasionally” (393). Her mother and
multiple other women tell her to forget about her career and find a good wealthy and caring
man to marry in order to have a good life (342). Her mother, while defiant of her father, only
goes against him when matters of Chetna’s life are being discussed and even then, she feeds
into the same patriarchal ideas, only different from her husband’s money-making plans.
Everyone’s principal opposition to Chetna becoming an executioner seems to be that no one
will marry her. Even Jatindranath, even as she is preparing to hang him, requests her to marry
his brother because neither of them will find anyone better due to their circumstances (392).
The patriarchal characters, while encouraging stereotypical femininity, seem to smother any
idea of female sexuality as a woman’s choice. Chetna is objectified by almost all the men she
meets. She is repeatedly harassed and molested but usually does show the men their place,
except for when the aggressions are committed by the man she loves. “A bird with its
feathers on fire cannot feel worried about women’s power and self-respect, I was convinced”
(158). Even the man she is about to hang refuses to see her as a threat and sexualizes her by
asking to see her repeatedly because he finds her beautiful. Her bosom is continually used as
a symbol of her femininity, displaying the manner in which she processes her emotions in
relation to her sexuality and womanhood. It is used to abuse and hurt her by her perpetrators
throughout the book. Her femininity is the root of her strengths and weaknesses, also being
the very thing that makes her prey to men. Towards the end of the book, she says her breasts
have turned to stone, symbolizing how she has now grown stronger, unmoving, and
unemotional towards the opposite sex. Along with Chetna, the other women in the book are
sexually oppressed too. Chetna’s father kills her aunt simply for the reason that he saw her in
an area of the town that he thought reflected badly on her character (399). He compares
“loose women” to thieves and murderers, (381) while openly being an adulterer himself.

Class
The book also indirectly talks a lot about class difference. Chetna and her family are poor
while Sanjeev Kumar Mitra is relatively rich, and this distinction is seen in almost all their
interactions where gender is not the focus of their power dynamic. Sanjeev Kumar Mitra is
seen as living in a wealthy area and not having experienced Bengali culture much. He also
seems unaware of the role that the lower classes currently play (201). However, there are
instances of him deliberately acknowledging his privilege in a manner that is demeaning to
Chetna and her family. For example, he takes Chetna to an expensive jewellery shop (which
he also plans to steal from) and tells her, this is not a place where your baba can enter (220).
He tells Chetna a story of how he was poor during his childhood, before becoming a
successful journalist. Thus, he becomes a symbol of class mobility in the book.
Sex work
There are multiple mentions of sex work in the book, whether in the form of the prostitutes
that Chetna’s father goes to, or Trailokya devi, Mitra’s mother. There is a stark contradiction
in the manner in which the theme of sex work is treated. On one side, the protagonist refers to
sex workers derogatorily, saying they were “Like insects and cockroaches crawling out of the
drain, innumerable women came out of the narrow dark by-lanes at night, with painted lips
and heavily rouged cheeks. They hung around outside, surrounding lone men” (235). On the
other end she describes Trailokya devi as beautiful and almost goddess like in her appearance
and mannerisms. Sometimes sex workers are seen as cheap, dirty and vulgar, but at other
times they talk about traditions like “The statue of Durga is made out of the soil taken from a
beshya’s doorstep. That is because the ego of the man that crosses it unravels and falls to the
ground there” (432). This also to some refers to the dichotomy of female sexuality being
worshipped but also being looked at as impure. Mitra himself is ashamed of his mother’s
identity and disowns her to the extent of telling everyone his mother died. However, his
mother’s presence makes him uncomfortable and this shows her power over him rather than
her being the victim.

Death, sorrow, capital punishment and the media

The book artfully balances the ugliness and beauty of the idea of death. It ranges from talking
about death in the aspect of something as rational as government policy and as scientific as
bodily functions, to something as fantastical as warriors and deities dying in stories of times
older than Christ. It questions the practice of capital punishment, with the age-old argument
that criminals are still human and no one is ever beyond reform. The protagonist is not alien
to this. Although herself making a career out of the process of state sanctioned execution, she
is seen to be sympathising with the very man she goes on to hang. She says, “It was
impossible to believe that he was a criminal, if you saw him laugh like that” (413). She even
hugs him when he requests her to do so. The criminal, Jatindranath, is humanised further
when he says that the government has killed him four or five times, and he’s glad that this is
the last time. At some points she mildly disagrees with the process, stating:
“Only much later did the complexity of the practice strike me: the policemen stood
guard, protecting one whom the government had hired to extinguish the life of another
human being. Once I learned that the procedures of democracy included many such
absurdities, I lost both the pride and the unease” (232)
After carrying out the execution, she feels the sense of power that one feels of carrying out
justice by taking a wrongdoer’s life, finally understanding why her ancestors had so much
pride in their profession (415).
Sanjeev Kumar Mitra is a symbol of how the media capitalises on these kinds of emotions
and feed off of them to stay in business, the “paparazzi” aspect that looks for content to create
“trauma porn” which gets them more viewership. Chetna talks about how he tried to take
photos of her disabled brother, without asking for consent, stating, “The camera leapt
greedily on the bed and, like Kali with her dreadful long tongue, licked him dry” (248). She
sees some ants eating a fish head and says that Mitra looks like a corpse eater ant, symbolic
of how he is also “feeding off of” or capitalising on death (233).
The book has great relevance in today’s political climate in that the argument of whether or
not capital punishment is an acceptable form of justice is a timeless question that appears to
have satisfactory explanations both in favour of, and against the concept. The book also
discusses the bureaucracy of the government and its regressive ideologies to some extent. It
goes without saying that feminism is still an extremely necessary social movement due to the
oppression of the patriarchy still being rampant in its subtler forms in society, and hence the
book is definitely relevant on that forefront.
“Hangwoman”, a Sahitya Akademi Award winner, and rightly so, is a remarkable piece of
feminist literature about a woman’s struggle to find her own identity, separate from the men
in her life. The plotlines and experiences of all the female characters are so realistic that one
would have a hard time calling this masterpiece a work of fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed
reading this book. As a feminist, I found it gripping and entertaining, with a very subtle sense
of dark humour.