When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy

Meena Kandasamy is a powerful Dalit Feminist voice in contemporary India. Her second novel When I Hit You or The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife is a searing story of how a woman is systematically stripped of her identity in an abusive marriage.

An unnamed narrator gives a harrowing account of her marriage to an educated progressive college lecturer who abused her mentally and physically. Through out the book, Kandasamy called out the hypocrisy of the husband who was an ex Marxist as well as an underground revolutionary but who selectively used progressive left ideas to merely justify his own ‘sadism’.

The short lyrical book is a vivid account of what life presented to the protagonist in the name of love. Not just her abusive husband but even her ex lover, a noted politician, shied away from acknowledging their relationship. Through this, the author commented on this compulsion of promoting public celibacy which dates back to Gandhi.

This pushed her into a hurried abusive marriage which stripped her of her individuality and reduced her to the mundane life of a wife. The vivid descriptions of physical assault and marital rape highlights the continued silence around the need to acknowledge sexual violence within a marriage.

A question may rise in the minds of readers that why the protagonist did not leave sooner. Kandasamy herself faced questions of similar nature. In this book, she explains how the expectations of the family, the larger society and one’s own hope stops women from walking out of bad marriages. Such walk outs are nothing less than acknowledging one’s own failure.

This is a power packed book which hits hard. The over-arching patriarchy which consumes even alleged progressive attitudes is elaborated here. It is a caution to those who believe and rightly so in the emancipatory potential of left politics and points to the dangers of hypocrisy.