Through reading Anita Nair’s Chain of Custody, this paper attempts to contextualise the collective trauma of children trapped in the dark and disturbing world of prostitution in India through their individual experiences. Nair’s work involves child prostitution, sexual violence and trauma. Her narrative traces the economic status, caste and gender of the victims of sexual violence, which plays an essential part in setting the premise of trauma. The trauma of child victims can take on more substantial societal forms when it transcends its subjectivity at symbolic or ideal levels, such as intensive interaction among the victims and collective mobilisation of the marginalised wounded group. Also, the trauma of sexual violence, which affects a group with definable membership, is necessarily associated with that group’s shared identity, i.e., prostitutes. This entails investigating how the trauma of sexually abused individuals could be conflated and articulated as a collective experience. The notions of trauma produce undefined meanings of painful experiences through language where the victims are associated with each other’s trauma. Such associations of lived individual experiences make collective trauma more specific. The paper consults trauma theorists to establish the arguments and to analyse the discussions around collective trauma and the experiences of characters portrayed in Nair’s narrative. The analysis leads us to think about how cultural traumas induced by distressing settings and frightening, unfair, and unsuitable events emerge as complex collective atmospheres and are characterised by a variety of collective emotions and orientations.

Authors:
Sheetal Kumari, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

About the Presenter(s)
Ms. Sheetal Kumari is currently working as Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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