Violence and Its Impatience

Needless to mention, violence operates through the contradictory disposition. Arguably, it registers its destructive impact on the individual and their moral and social sensibility following either the patient and rational or the impatient and irrational mode. In its patient articulation, violence produced by the socially dominant forces (caste and patriarchy) for lower caste persons and women assumes the naturalised form of habit. It is naturalised, normalised, and routined over several decades and even centuries.

Violence, in another sense, also follows the patient mode inasmuch as it benumbs social sensibility when members of the caste-, race-, and gender-driven society passively or indirectly participate in watching the act of physical violence that is occasionally but outrageously tossed around by dominant social forces. Violence that moves with creeping patience is enacted by the tormentor with vicarious coolness, thus effectively causing the victims everyday forms of humiliation. Thus, humiliation that morally incarcerates the victim ultimately leads to social death where they are morally dead on account of them being consumed in utter servility. Thus, violence gets subsumed in the structure of superiority and inferiority. The resistance against such structural violence creates new forms of humiliation that are the results of Dalit and women’s assertion for dignity and self-respect. Such assertions do create moral and social discomfort for the dominant forces, who thereupon seek to use social boycott to quell the assertion.