Vol.:(0123456789) Jindal Global Law Review https://doi.org/10.1007/s41020-018-0080-4 1 3 ARTICLE Another story of the Open Letter: an inheritance of relationship‑making Debolina Dutta 1 © O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) 2018 Abstract In 1979, four law professors wrote the “Open Letter” to the Chief Justice of India (OL). It was written as a way of registering public protest against a decision of the Supreme Court pertaining to the rape of a young tribal girl, Mathura, in police cus- tody. Within contemporary Indian feminist jurisprudential accounts, this text has attained iconic status. The OL has been hailed for mobilising a nationwide women’s movement around the issue of rape and also for initiating rape law reform. In this paper, I move away from the iconicity attached to the OL in the annals of feminist jurisprudence, without disavowing its importance. By locating my reading in a back- drop of our current climate that is saturated with animosities, I attempt to tell a dif- ferent story about it. I look at how Baxi’s scholarly practice of co-authoring the OL inhabited a conduct of relations with his co-authors, a judge, the tribal girl, Mathura, and his academic discipline of law in a post-Emergency India. In doing so, I weave a story about the OL as an everyday practice of reciprocal relationship-making, in its own time and place. My account of the OL attends to how, by creating recipro- cal relations, we might be able to re-organise our worlds into a place that we desire to inhabit. Keywords Open Letter · Upendra Baxi · Feminism · Jurisprudence · India · Conduct of Relations Most letters are meant to go no further; indeed had they all circulated, the world would have perished under the weight of stupendous boredom. How- Debolina Dutta—PhD Researcher. * Debolina Dutta debolina26@gmail.com 1 Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia