No honour in homicide

It has been one week since Kavin Selva Ganesh’s mother and father — Chandrasekar and Tamilselvi — laid his brutally mutilated physique to relaxation. Their grief transcends the display screen in each video clip that surfaces on-line. Their 27-year-old son, an IT worker in Chennai, hailing from Arumugamangalam, a hamlet in Thoothookudi district, was allegedly murdered by his girlfriend’s brother, Surjith, as a result of Kavin belonged to the Devendra Kula Velalar or Pallar caste categorised as a Scheduled Caste (SC) in India. Surjith belonged to the Most Backward Caste in a neighborhood categorised as Mukkulathor caste group, who additionally go by Thevars.

‘Honour’ killings have turn out to be a standard hate crime in Tamil Nadu with mounting cases of SC youth being hunted down and killed for having beloved exterior of their caste. While rooted in caste hatred, additionally it is rooted in deep-seated misogyny. An article in Economic and Political Weekly on June 28 speaks of how conventional marriage customs, rooted in caste endogamy, contribute to violence towards {couples} who defy these norms. This is explicit to Dalit males who marry or affiliate with girls from different communities, particularly Savarna girls.

Dominant caste teams consider that girls who love and marry, or in Kavin’s case, intend to marry exterior of their caste, are pollution of caste purity. A girl’s autonomy right here is met with punitive measures. Lest we overlook the horrible destiny of Vimaladevi, a 20-year-old caste Hindu lady from Poothipuram village in Madurai district, who was discovered hanging from a tree in 2014 as a result of she eloped along with her lover, a Dalit youth, Dhilip Kumar. Her mother and father had been allegedly concerned in her homicide. D. Suresh Kumar provides that there’s a notion that caste killings occur solely in villages. Women and males aren’t freed from caste in cities too as demonstrated on this article in The Hindu.

For years now, activists have been demanding a legislation dealing solely with honour killings. Anti-caste activist A. Kathir, says {that a} group got here up with a draft, titled The Freedom of Marriage and Association and Prohibition of Crimes within the Name of Honour Act, 2022. Despite the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam promising to honour the creation of the act, it’s but to see the sunshine of day.

Based on the social media posts and video edits supporting Surjith from members of his caste, it’s evident that this deep-rooted divide between caste teams and their inherent misogyny, within the land deemed ‘progressive’, won’t die down. In a rustic that makes an attempt to save lots of the establishment of marriage in any respect ranges, even in courts, it is very important defend those that want to marry exterior of the shackles caste.

Toolkit

The Tamil Nadu authorities launched State Policy for Transgender Persons 2025 on August 1. It is a five-year highway map that guarantees training, and dignity with respect to self-identification with out medical certification. Some of essentially the most notable elements of the doc embody taking on the amending of The Hindu Succession Act, Indian Succession Act, amongst others, to make sure proper of inheritance to transgender and intersex individuals; and the availability of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis to stop HIV transmission and the institution of standardised medical protocol to deal with transgender individuals.

Wordsworth

Topside check: “Are there two trans individuals in a narrative speaking to one another about one thing apart from medical transition?”

The Topside Test coined by writer Torrey Peters’ hopes to be a metric that solutions this precise query, particularly within the area of literature. Peters, who’s trans herself, authored Stag Dance which was launched in March 2025. While selling her guide in a podcast, the writer stated {that a} tradition should evolve round talking of trans concepts capturing the every day lifetime of queer individuals as a substitute of receiving sympathy from cisgender readers.

Ouch!

“Just as a result of one is a lady, the federal government shouldn’t be giving cash to make movies. They also needs to be supplied coaching. They ought to know all of the difficulties concerned in making a movie.”

Veteran Malayali filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan on incentives for ladies in movie.

Women we meet

Krupa Ge, a author and translator, who introduced out her guide Burns Boy in July, has been engaged on intersectional literature since her first guide River Remembers, a non-fiction on local weather change, focussing on the Chennai floods of 2015. She says that as a lady and a mom, she has not too long ago felt a shift in loyalty in direction of motherhood for apparent causes.

“I used to be solely an “heir”, a daughter, after I wrote What We Know About Her (her first fiction novel). When I completed Burns Boy, I used to be a mom myself. And to write down in regards to the mom within the guide and the daughter Aparna was enjoyable in addition to cathartic having simply skilled the violence of what Lucy Jones writes about in her lovely guide Matrescence,” she says.

She says that the world round her is troublesome to witness. “Being a mom can be to really feel completely helpless, watching these moms of infants in Gaza, and the boys risking their lives for flour and formulation,” she says. Krupa has loved translating girls and is at the moment translating brief fiction.