This story is from February 5, 2016

Journalist opens up about ‘khatna’ among Bohras, campaigns against it

Aarefa Johari was seven when she was taken to a dingy building in Bhendi Bazaar for an appointment with a woman she did not know. Her frock was pulled up. Her mother told her that something would happen to her “down there” that would only take a minute. In hindsight, she’s thankful for what little preparation she received before her “khatna”, the word Bohras use for circumcision. The procedure fits the World Health Organization’s definition of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Journalist opens up about ‘khatna’ among Bohras, campaigns against it
Mumbai: Aarefa Johari was seven when she was taken to a dingy building in Bhendi Bazaar for an appointment with a woman she did not know. Her frock was pulled up. Her mother told her that something would happen to her “down there” that would only take a minute. In hindsight, she’s thankful for what little preparation she received before her “khatna”, the word Bohras use for circumcision.
The procedure fits the World Health Organization’s definition of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).The Bohra community, though, would never dream of calling it that. “Bohras think FGM is one of those terrible things that ‘African tribals’ do. They only think they’re snipping off a tiny bit of skin. But given the unscientific manner in which it’s often performed, there’s no way of knowing how much skin is cut off. And why should they be cutting off anything at all?” asks Johari (29), journalist and co-founder of Sahiyo, an organization battling khatna.
She remembers “something being done between my legs” at the time of her khatna. “I think I cried and was in pain,” she says, recollecting vaguely a sense of soreness while urinating soon after. But the pain wore off, and she didn’t think much of the incident while growing up.
“Bohras use the word khatna for male circumcision as well as what’s done to women. I remember khatnas being celebrated in a big way for boys in the family. It was a little more hush-hush for girls, and was sometimes celebrated with a quiet lunch,” she says.
Many years later, as an adolescent, she recalls her mother showing her a magazine piece on a Bohra woman talking about her own experience of khatna. That was probably the first time both mother and daughter began thinking of the subject.
As a college student exposed to feminist ideas while studying liberal arts, Johari began understanding what had happened to her. She began reading about khatna, a practice that Dawoodi Bohras in western India inherited from Yemen, where they trace the ideological origins of their sect. It was a practice meant to snip the woman’s clitoris, a part of the external genitalia involved in sexual pleasure.
The more she read, the angrier Johari became. It was virtually a case of retrospective trauma as she began recollecting what she went through in that room in Bhendi Bazaar. Initially, her anger and betrayal was directed at her mother. After all, it was her mother who had taken her for the procedure. And isn’t your mother supposed to protect you?

Much later she began to realize that it wasn’t her mother’s fault. “Women are often used as a mere cog in the wheel of patriarchy. Men don’t always have to be directly involved in the process of controlling women,” says Johari. She figured, over time, that her mother had not intentionally tried to harm her, and had not known the implications of the procedure.
While the physical damage that FGM will have on a woman will vary depending on how much is cut off, Johari stresses on the psychological scars. As for whether the practice affects a woman’s sex life, Johari says that’s something she will never personally know, because she will never have a frame of reference.
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