The essay confronts a problem of political thought approached through the question of cruelty inflicted on Hindu widows of Bengali middle-class families. As the harrowing descriptions of oppression raise a mixture of sadness, horror and anger in the author along with a desire and the will to intervene, he questions these emotions in the light of the knowledge of violence on which the state and its laws are founded. He speaks of the violence of the same modernity that teaches us to think of the law as a key instrument of social justice.

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