Contributions to Indian Sociology 53, 1 (2019): 46–71 SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/ Melbourne DOI: 10.1177/0069966718812522 Law, police and ‘domestic cruelty’: Assembling written complaints from oral narratives Pooja Satyogi This article examines the relationship between law and the police in the Special Protection Unit for Women and Children (Unit), Delhi. It explicates how women police offcers negotiate meanings of ‘domestic cruelty’ under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, read with Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), in a milieu where narratives of violence they encounter from women complainants often challenge interpretations of domestic violence. Taking two instances, one in which a complainant came to the Unit without a written complaint, and the second in which changes were made to the complaint after it was offcially submitted, I delineate the shape that their formal complaints took, central to which was the role performed by the police offcers assigned to them. The offcers, I contend, strove to make the complaints legally stand up, with the awareness that although most complaints do not end in litigation, the act of writing the complaint constituted an important step for complainants to get what I call a working sense of their experiences of cruelty. I conclude that although police’s discretionary power is understood to give way to reckless arbitrariness and discrimination, its mutability and amorphousness can also contribute towards enabling redress for injury. Keywords: police, discretion, domestic violence, narratives, law, bureaucracy I Introduction On 27 July 2009, the Supreme Court of India, in Bhaskar Lal Sharma and Another v. Monica, ruled that a husband and his relatives could not be prosecuted on charges of ‘domestic cruelty’ towards his wife, under Section Pooja Satyogi is at Ambedkar University Delhi, Delhi, India. E-mail: poojasatyogi@gmail.com